A family moves across a border and needs to register an address, arrange a school place and understand health coverage. Each agency has a tidy website. Yet the family must repeat the same information, interpret different words for the same status and discover which step comes first. Every individual page might pass a usability test while the life event remains difficult.
The Nordic Council of Ministers’ 2025 report A Small Step for Digitalisation, a Giant Leap for Humanity? Reflections on Human-centredness in the Public Sector asks what it would mean to design public administration around people rather than around isolated systems. Karin García Ambrosiani and Fredric Skargren use the Nordic DigiGov Lab project to organize the question through governance, public services, and innovation. Their publication is reflective and exploratory. It offers a way to ask better questions, not evidence that one portal or policy has solved the family’s problem.
What the report is and where it comes from
The report appeared as TemaNord 2025:554 in June 2025. Nordic DigiGov Lab is a project involving Sweden’s Agency for Digital Government, Norway’s Digitalisation Agency and Finland’s Digital and Population Data Services Agency, with Nordic Council of Ministers support. Its stated focus is helping people in Nordic and Baltic countries navigate life events through digital public services. The publication is an edited, translated version of an earlier Swedish Digg reflection.
The authors are explicit about their form. They do not offer ready-made answers. They draw on policy examples and research to prompt discussion among decision makers, practitioners, researchers and interested citizens. That matters for evidence. A diagram of three dimensions is a conceptual tool, not a validated scale or a causal estimate of how many hours a reform saves.
The title is deliberately a question. A small technical change can be a large human improvement if it removes repeated applications or clarifies a right. A large platform investment can make little difference if the person still carries the work of coordinating agencies. The useful unit of evaluation is therefore the experience and outcome across the journey, while respecting the public values that each agency must uphold.
“Human-centred” can mean several things
The phrase can refer to an easy interface, but the report gives it a deeper scope. It connects human and civil rights, people’s needs, the organization of public administration and the ability to adapt policy. A button placed in the center of a screen is not evidence that a person is at the center of a system.
People are not one uniform “user.” A parent with a stable connection, a person with a disability, a small business owner, and someone without a digital identity may face the same service very differently. Income, education, place and language affect access and willingness to use digital channels. A human-centred approach needs to ask whose experience was studied and whose difficulty remains invisible in an average success rate.
The authors also remind readers that a person encounters public administration through life events, not only through agency boundaries. Moving, caring for a relative or starting a business can touch several authorities and private actors. The rule that governs one step may be written elsewhere. An apparently simple form cannot repair a conflict in rules by itself.
Rights constrain design as well as motivate it. A service that feels smooth may still collect too much data or make an error hard to challenge. The European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles provides part of the normative setting cited by the report. It expresses a political commitment to an inclusive, fair and safe digital transformation. The declaration is not a shortcut around the particular laws that govern a service.
Dimension one: governance
Human-centred governance concerns how priorities, responsibilities and resources are set across the public sector. If every agency optimizes its own transaction count, nobody may be accountable for the full experience of a person moving across jurisdictions. The report asks whether coordination can be built at a level that sees the whole life event.
Governance must choose what to prioritize. High-volume services touch many people and can justify attention on that basis. Low-volume situations may still deserve priority when the cost of failure is severe or when a group faces systematic exclusion. Counting clicks alone cannot settle the choice. Qualitative accounts can reveal friction that a dashboard misses, while quantitative evidence can show scale and distribution.
The report uses examples of horizontal coordination, shared infrastructure and policy arrangements from Nordic and Baltic countries. These are illustrations of possible approaches, not a ranking of countries. A shared component can reduce repeated work, but it also requires clarity about who maintains it, corrects bad data and answers when a person is harmed. The institutional architecture matters as much as the software.
Participation is another governance issue. It is easy to consult people after the major choices have already been made. A more meaningful process asks affected groups what outcome matters, explains constraints, and lets their evidence change priorities. That does not mean the loudest participants decide every public rule. Officials must balance individual experiences with equality, legal certainty and obligations to people who are not in the room.
Dimension two: public services
The service dimension is closest to the family’s experience. A public service may need to cross agency borders, connect digital and in-person channels, and adapt to complicated situations. The report draws on the OECD’s 2024 Recommendation on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services, which asks governments to consider people’s perspectives, needs, experiences and expectations while safeguarding trust, privacy, security and the rule of law.
A life-event journey map can expose where a person must repeat information or wait for one decision before making the next request. Yet a map is a hypothesis about a journey. It should be checked with people whose circumstances vary. A person who can complete a standard online path may not represent someone whose documents are unusual or who needs interpretation or face-to-face support.
The once-only principle is one example discussed in the report. If an authority already holds accurate information, a person should not have to enter it repeatedly without reason. This can save time and reduce inconsistencies. It also raises questions: was the original record correct, may it be shared for this purpose, can the person see and correct it, and what happens when agencies disagree? Once-only is a service ambition subject to rights and data-governance tests, not an unlimited instruction to pool records.
Some problems are complicated but predictable; others are complex and change as people act. A routine address confirmation may fit a clear digital sequence. A family with overlapping care, migration and school issues may need a conversation that clarifies which rule applies. Human-centred service design can include a good digital path and a real route to a knowledgeable person. Removing the latter solely because a portal looks efficient would make the service less responsive.
The report notes tension between serving a particular group well and maintaining fairness across groups. Co-design with one community can improve understanding, but an exclusive process may overlook others. Follow-up should therefore examine relevance, quality, efficiency and equity after launch, and should permit revision or withdrawal when a design does not work.
Dimension three: innovation and reform
The third dimension asks whether public administration can rethink its work, not just make an existing form faster. An innovative service might change an internal process, create a new service, adjust governance or redefine an old problem. The authors discuss the possibility of certain rights being granted proactively rather than only after a person applies. Such a change could remove a heavy burden, but it would require excellent data, clear eligibility rules and a way to challenge mistakes.
Innovation depends on governance and service evidence. A new technical capability is not itself a reason to deploy it. The question is what problem it solves and how the proposed reform affects accountability. Data analysis can identify patterns and help monitor a service, but a pattern does not explain every individual’s circumstances. Forecasting can suggest scenarios without deciding rights.
The report mentions regulatory sandboxes and collaboration as possible spaces for experimentation. A pilot can be valuable when it has a bounded question, safeguards, an evaluation plan and a decision rule for scaling or stopping. A sandbox should not become a permanent zone where affected people have weaker rights. Public institutions must hold experimentation and legal certainty together.
Reform may also mean choosing not to digitize a step. Some situations benefit from physical interaction or community support. A mature innovation process can recognize that a better letter, clearer rule or staffed service may outperform an AI assistant. The report’s human-centred framing gives permission to compare options by outcomes rather than by novelty.
How the three dimensions interact
The dimensions can be developed separately, but they shape one another. Governance can require a shared life-event outcome and assign responsibility. Service teams can discover where a rule or dataset blocks that outcome. Innovation can propose a different process, which governance must then authorize and monitor. If one dimension is missing, the others may stall.
Consider the family’s school registration. A service designer can simplify the screen, but cannot remove a statutory requirement alone. A central authority can authorize data exchange, but cannot know whether the family understands the result without service research. An innovation unit can design a proactive notification, but needs a lawful data source and a correction route. The best interface is the visible end of a much larger arrangement.
This interaction suggests an evaluation plan. Measure whether people complete the life event, how long it takes, how often they repeat information, who drops out and how errors are corrected. Add interviews or observation to learn why a number changed. Track staff work and institutional cost so the burden is not merely moved from one place to another. These are Institute suggestions drawn from the report’s framework, not a validated metric set supplied by the authors.
Digital inclusion is a service outcome
A digital-only service may be convenient for many and inaccessible to some. The report names education, location, gender and income among factors that shape use, and emphasizes geographical access. A service should therefore test both the average path and the difficult path. Accessibility features, translation, assisted channels and a clear alternative can determine whether a right is usable.
Inclusion also concerns trust. A person may have internet access but hesitate to enter sensitive information if the reason for collection is unclear. Another may use a device shared with family members and be unable to keep a case private. Good service design explains data use, offers control where possible and recognizes that “online” does not mean “safe” for every person.
The family moving across a border faces an additional problem: agencies may use different languages, identifiers and concepts. Cross-border coordination can reduce the burden, but it must not obscure which authority made a decision and where an appeal belongs. Seamlessness for the user should be paired with traceability of responsibility.
Where AI fits, and where it does not
The report discusses human-centred AI as one part of digitalisation. An AI system might translate a document, help staff navigate rules or identify a likely missing step. It could also produce a confident error, amplify bias in source data or make a service opaque. Calling the system human-centred does not resolve these risks. Evaluation must ask what capability it augments and what oversight remains.
A person-facing chatbot may seem helpful, but the standard is not whether it sounds friendly. Can it identify the authoritative source? Does it handle uncommon cases safely? Can the user reach a human with the authority to correct a wrong decision? If the tool mainly deflects contact while leaving the person uncertain, a lower call volume would be a misleading success metric.
AI may also help officials analyze demand, but public service data encode previous patterns of access. If an excluded group rarely appears in records, a system trained on those records may conclude that its needs are rare. Qualitative inquiry and participation are necessary complements. The report’s broader model is valuable precisely because it prevents technology from becoming the only lens.
How to use a reflective report responsibly
First, read it as a conceptual map. Ask which of the three dimensions is responsible for a particular problem and where coordination is missing. Second, use its examples as prompts for comparison. A portal in another country can suggest a design, but local law, identity systems and public expectations may differ. Copying a visible feature without the underlying governance may disappoint.
Third, test outcomes in the actual service. The authors do not report a controlled trial establishing that life-event portals universally improve well-being or trust. A municipality could pilot a coordinated journey with clear baseline measures, compare outcomes for different groups and publish what did not improve. That would turn the report’s questions into local evidence.
Finally, keep the political choices visible. Human-centredness can sound universally agreeable, yet priorities conflict. Whose burden should be reduced first? How much information should agencies share? When should a human review be mandatory? A digital project cannot answer these questions by choosing a design method. Public deliberation and accountable governance remain necessary.
What the evidence does not show
TemaNord 2025:554 does not prove that a specific Nordic or Baltic country has achieved a fully human-centred public sector. Its country examples illustrate strategies, portals, collaboration and funding, often using sources available when the authors wrote. An example’s presence does not measure its effect or guarantee that its status is unchanged today.
The three dimensions are an organizing framework, not a diagnostic score with a validated threshold. The report does not show that digital services are always preferable to human contact, that once-only sharing is always lawful, or that AI is necessary for a seamless service. It explicitly aims to encourage questions and discussion rather than deliver ready-made answers.
The supporting OECD recommendation and EU declaration are normative instruments. They help explain the values at stake but do not independently verify the success of any implementation described here. Claims about a live portal, current legal duty or procurement choice should be checked against the responsible authority at the time of use.
Return to the family
The family’s experience improves if the route through address, school and health services is understandable, lawful and correct, with a person to help when their situation does not match the standard path. That may require a small interface change, a large governance agreement, or both. The report’s question becomes concrete at that point: did digitalisation reduce the work the family had to perform to claim its rights?
Human-centredness is most useful when it can be examined in practice. The Nordic report gives public institutions a vocabulary for examining governance, services and reform together. Its contribution is to make the invisible coordination behind a good public experience discussable, and to keep the person affected by the system present when institutions decide what to build.
Research references
- García Ambrosiani, K., & Skargren, F. (2025). A small step for digitalisation, a giant leap for humanity? Reflections on human-centredness in the public sector. TemaNord 2025:554. Nordic Council of Ministers. View source
- Nordic Council of Ministers. (2025). Nordic DigiGov Lab, project description in TemaNord 2025:554. View source
- OECD. (2024). Recommendation of the Council on Human-Centred Public Administrative Services, OECD/LEGAL/0503. View source
- European Parliament, Council and Commission. (2023). European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade. View source
- Nordic Council of Ministers. (2025). Three dimensions of a human-centric public sector, report chapter. View source