Such a high degree of participation gives us extensive information on the municipalities’ digitalisation efforts. Based on the questions from the survey, we have constructed and followed up a set of indicators which covers three main topics related to the digitalisation process: digital priority, digital competence, and digital activity (Rybalka, Røgeberg and Dyngen, 2019). This report focuses on the development of indicators from the 1st quarter of 2018 to the 1st quarter of 2022. Also, it presents the areas which have evolved most in the recent years, and areas with challenges which still have the potential for growth.

Main findings for digital priority:

  • More municipalities have an ICT/digitalisation strategy in 2022 compared to 2018, and the strategies become more comprehensive over time. There is a considerable increase from 2018 to 2022 in the share of municipalities which include area “Robotics” in their strategies. The same is registered for the areas “Cloud computing services” and “Use of data from other public enterprises”. The most frequent areas in the municipality ICT/digitalisation strategies are “Information security” and “Standards-based open and reusable digital solutions”.
  • Most municipalities engage actively in ICT projects. In 2022, more municipalities in the smallest group report implementation of ICT projects than in 2018. Also, ICT projects become more extensive over time (i.e., they are assumed to affect more areas) and are expected to affect the work tasks of the employees to a higher extent.

Main findings for digital competence:

  • In 2022, more municipalities report that most of their ICT functions are performed by internal employees than in 2018. This applies particularly to such functions as “Project management for digitalisation”, “Development of ICT/digitalisation strategy” and “IT training of internal users”. The functions “Security testing” and “Development of internet solutions” are in exception as being mainly outsourced to external suppliers. We observe greater awareness among the municipalities when it comes to the functions “Security testing” and “Project management for digitalisation”.
  • Critical lack of skills. In 2022, five of ten municipalities consider the lack of skills to be a barrier to development of the municipality's digital services to a large or very large extent. This is a substantial increase from 2018 when the share was four of ten.
  • Five of ten municipalities tried to recruit ICT/IT specialists in 2022, a rise from three of ten municipalities in 2018. The highest growth in the share of recruiting municipalities is observed for those in the smallest group.
  • Difficulties with recruitment: In 2018, 32 per cent of recruiting municipalities reported problems with recruiting ICT/IT specialists. This share rose to 56 per cent in 2022 and is still growing steadily reaching 72 per cent in 2023.

Main findings for digital activity

  • A high growth in the share of municipalities using cloud computing services. As many as 95.5 per cent of municipalities report use of cloud computing in 2022. Such services as “Office tools”, “Internal/external communication by means of calls, chat and/or e-mail” and “Virtual meeting rooms” are the most popular cloud solutions in 2022, over 90 percent of the municipalities are using each of them. Among the cloud computing services, the largest increase from 2018 to 2022 is registered for such solutions as office tools, operating platforms, back-up, databases, application servers, and virtual servers. The share of municipalities using these services increased by as much as 30-38 percentage points from 2018 to 2022.
  • A high increase in the share of municipalities which receive offers and evaluate and allocate contracts electronically. The share of municipalities which receive offers only electronically goes up from four of ten in 2018 to seven of ten in 2022. In 2018, almost 37 percent of municipalities did not evaluate and award contracts electronically while in 2022 the same share equals only 6.5 per cent. Among all the activities within digital purchases of goods and services in 2022, we find receiving invoices to be the most frequent electronic activity while follow-up of contacts is still at the bottom with the lowest share of municipalities following up their contracts electronically.
  • A moderate development in the municipalities' offer of digital services to population. This mostly applies to complex individual services that require login (65 per cent of municipalities provide this service in 2022 compared to 45 per cent in 2018). However, the municipalities appear to be much more active users of digital services rather than providers of such services. Thus, there still is a potential for further improvements.