Finnish Tax Administration: Creating a connected company

The Finnish Tax Administration’s mission is to collect the right taxes at the right time to fund public services, with the aims of ensuring tax revenue, a fair tax assessment, and a positive taxpayer experience. To help reach these goals, we co-created a vision of a connected company and practical guidelines to harness data analytics for making the right decisions and learning new things every day.

The challenge

In recent years, the Finnish Tax Administration, with its 5,000-plus employees, has undergone a major transformation. It is reforming its culture and ways of working to enable a better internal customer experience, more efficient operations, and greater employee engagement. To take things to the next level, it was time to make data analytics inspirational, available, and useful for everyone in the organization. A holistic approach combining governance, tools, skills, ways of working, processes and a data-informed culture was needed. Futurice, as a trusted partner of the Finnish Tax Administration, was chosen for the job.

Highlights

Efficient implementation of strategy: concrete change happens through action.
Improved customer and employee experience: better services, more meaningful work.
Better results: validated decisions based on knowledge, faster processes, savings in time and money.
Complexity simplified with creative and strategic thinking: ways to genuinely support people with modern technology.

What we did

Together with the Finnish Tax Administration, we created a common vision for data analytics. The vision guides the transformation in two stages: until 2025 and from then to 2035. Becoming a connected company that creates and shares new knowledge was set as a development goal. By a connected company, we mean an organization that identifies the opportunities and relevant problems it can solve with data, finds the data with the best potential, connects people with valuable knowledge, and crafts solutions that deliver real value. This major shift in culture also has a direct impact on the customer experience.

In practice, becoming a connected company requires people to understand and be excited about using data. Technology, or the data itself, can’t solve this challenge, but creative strategic thinking can, so we used marketing, branding and storytelling methods to productize the in-house data analytics offering in a way that appeals to everyone. The vision and attendant methods are now described in a brand book, including a clear mission statement, position, and promise.

We’ve also created a series of data analytics concepts that support the organization's tribe model and development. The application areas include, for example, customer understanding, qualitative analytics, digital economy, empirical tax risk management, impact assessment and sharing information from reports. These concepts are currently being scaled in other parts of the organization. All the work has been done in close collaboration with teams consisting of Finnish Tax Administration experts and management.

I feel we’ve grown and developed our thinking remarkably during the process. Futurice’s strategic thinking and creativity have had a huge impact on our cultural transformation and in reaching our goals. They’ve managed to present and implement data analytics as a part of everyday work.

Sanni Luoto

Tribe Concept Owner, Finnish Tax Administration

Why it matters

When people are inspired and really participate, change happens. The goals described in the strategy are no longer abstract – they’ve become concrete for everyone. The data analytics functions at the Finnish Tax Administration are now based on the real needs of customers and employees, not just interesting experiments. When even the most technically complex things are presented as simple and efficient solutions to daily challenges, people start to use them. They can concentrate on solving the challenges and take ownership of the innovations.

Using data analytics also helps see how individual work affects the entire organization and the lives of customers, illustrating how a single task is actually a part of something bigger and meaningful. At the same time, the processed data helps make validated decisions and predict the future, all the way from daily operations to the upper management. Cause-and-effect relationships of things become clearer, too, and silent information is never lost.

Knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is the same power multiplied.

Data analytics is all about people. Futurice has brought us creativity and vision without which we couldn’t have accomplished the culture change. They deliver more than theory. Instead of consultant jargon, we get sharp thinking combined with top-level and practical marketing skills.

Jan-Erik Antipin

Tribe lead Analytics Service Owner, Finnish Tax Administration

About Finnish Tax Administration

The Finnish Tax Administration is an organization under the Ministry of Finance which collects about two-thirds of Finnish taxes and parafiscal charges. The tax revenue collected by the Tax Administration in 2019 was approximately EUR 70 billion. It employs over 5,000 people.