The City of Helsinki takes care of its own. In fact, it offers its citizens hundreds of services from healthcare to housing to infrastructure. Over 38,000 employees help provide those services, making the city the largest employer in the country.
Those services generate enormous quantities of data, continuously building upon an already vast store. “We’ve been utilizing many of our services for a very long time,” says Tomas Lehtinen, Head of Data for the City of Helsinki. “Some of our systems have data going back almost 30 years.” In 2019, the city established a data strategy to start harnessing the potential of that data. “Our team wanted to enable data-driven decision-making,” says Lehtinen, “as well as to apply that data to optimizing the city’s operations and proactively responding to citizens’ service needs on their terms.”
At the time, each service organization had its own customer service team,
and many dealt with high volumes of citizen requests. “Customer service personnel were overworked,” says Janne Kantsila, Leading Specialist in automation Technologies for the City of Helsinki. “At the same time, we wanted to improve the customer experience. Our citizens expected faster service and more flexible service hours. They didn’t want to be put in queues.”
To help address these issues, the city turned to virtual assistants or “chatbots”—experimenting with various vendors’ solutions across several departments. Once the city had verified how virtual assistants could best serve its citizens, it developed a request for proposal (RFP) for a virtual assistant platform to support its long-term digitalization needs.
Chief among the platform requirements were natural language processing and the ability to connect to other systems including those of Helsinki’s regional internal departments, other Finland cities and outside vendors—using APIs. The virtual assistants also linked to many other areas indirectly, such as the release of the virtual assistant training data on Helsinki Region Infoshare, an open web service established in 2011 over which major cities in the metropolitan area could exchange data. “By opening up our chatbot data, we could help other cities in Finland
with their own chatbots, so they wouldn’t have to start from scratch,”
says Kantsila.
Other required capabilities included the ability to connect to process automation via APIs and automated translations. Data privacy laws are stringent in the EU and even more so in Finland, where transparency and trust are top priorities. The City of Helsinki wanted a solution that could run from a local Finland data center, when needed, to protect highly sensitive data, like social services and healthcare information.
IBM offered the best overall solution for the city’s needs and had a local
Helsinki team that could help deliver it.
The City of Helsinki takes care of its own. In fact, it offers its citizens hundreds of services from healthcare to housing to infrastructure. Over 38,000 employees help provide those services, making the city the largest employer in the country.
Those services generate enormous quantities of data, continuously building upon an already vast store. “We’ve been utilizing many of our services for a very long time,” says Tomas Lehtinen, Head of Data for the City of Helsinki. “Some of our systems have data going back almost 30 years.” In 2019, the city established a data strategy to start harnessing the potential of that data. “Our team wanted to enable data-driven decision-making,” says Lehtinen, “as well as to apply that data to optimizing the city’s operations and proactively responding to citizens’ service needs on their terms.”
At the time, each service organization had its own customer service team,
and many dealt with high volumes of citizen requests. “Customer service personnel were overworked,” says Janne Kantsila, Leading Specialist in automation Technologies for the City of Helsinki. “At the same time, we wanted to improve the customer experience. Our citizens expected faster service and more flexible service hours. They didn’t want to be put in queues.”
To help address these issues, the city turned to virtual assistants or “chatbots”—experimenting with various vendors’ solutions across several departments. Once the city had verified how virtual assistants could best serve its citizens, it developed a request for proposal (RFP) for a virtual assistant platform to support its long-term digitalization needs.
Chief among the platform requirements were natural language processing and the ability to connect to other systems including those of Helsinki’s regional internal departments, other Finland cities and outside vendors—using APIs. The virtual assistants also linked to many other areas indirectly, such as the release of the virtual assistant training data on Helsinki Region Infoshare, an open web service established in 2011 over which major cities in the metropolitan area could exchange data. “By opening up our chatbot data, we could help other cities in Finland
with their own chatbots, so they wouldn’t have to start from scratch,”
says Kantsila.
Other required capabilities included the ability to connect to process automation via APIs and automated translations. Data privacy laws are stringent in the EU and even more so in Finland, where transparency and trust are top priorities. The City of Helsinki wanted a solution that could run from a local Finland data center, when needed, to protect highly sensitive data, like social services and healthcare information.
IBM offered the best overall solution for the city’s needs and had a local
Helsinki team that could help deliver it.
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