City of Helsinki: Real-time situational awareness for better decision-making

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance and value of real-time situational awareness in decision-making for cities and societies. The City of Helsinki wanted a way to monitor developments daily and use timely information to support leadership decisions.

The city is managed through its city strategy, among other mechanisms, and developing that strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of the city's current state. The initial hypothesis was that situational awareness would be needed both for Helsinki as an ecosystem and for the city's service operations.

The City Executive Office launched several initiatives to strengthen data-driven management, with Futurice serving as its strategic partner. The overall program consisted of 13 workstreams covering topics such as identifying new opportunities, building data architecture, developing reporting capabilities, designing operating models, and strengthening organizational capabilities to make better use of timely, high-quality data in decision-making.

We began by interviewing city division directors, mayoral advisors, and experts already using situational awareness tools in their work. Based on these interviews, we developed a framework defining when the city should produce real-time, automatically updated situational dashboards and when other methods of information gathering would be more appropriate.

Together with the city, we designed a unified Azure architecture and design guidelines for citywide situational-awareness dashboards. We also supported the development of a shared operational environment dashboard that provides a city-wide view of key developments.

The data architecture solutions and lessons learned were documented in a playbook covering the technologies, conventions, and naming standards used throughout the program.

The City Executive Office also developed standardized Power BI report templates aligned with the city's brand and accessibility requirements. These templates were validated by usability experts, and a comprehensive reporting guide was created to support consistent report development.

Finally, insights from the various projects were consolidated into communication materials that help expand and strengthen the city's data-driven management capabilities across the organization.

At its core, the program was about initiating a cultural transformation toward data-driven decision-making within the City of Helsinki. The city is still in the early stages of developing shared, citywide ways of working in this area. Different city divisions and the City Executive Office currently have diverse information needs and use different technologies to manage and analyze data.

During the project, automated data pipelines were built to integrate both internal and external data sources into the city's reporting environment. However, Helsinki's technology landscape is extensive and highly diverse, consisting of approximately 900 systems. Many of the oldest systems cannot yet provide all the information needed to fully support data-driven decision-making.

The program also brought together people from across Helsinki's large organization, creating a shared understanding of ongoing initiatives and identifying projects that will ultimately provide valuable insights for the city's senior leadership.

Throughout the program, understanding of data-driven management grew significantly among both city leadership and operational divisions. In addition, the city established a common vocabulary and shared concepts for discussing and developing data-driven decision-making.

About City of Helsinki

Home to more than 650,000 residents, Helsinki is Finland's capital, largest city, and the economic center of the Helsinki metropolitan region. The City of Helsinki is also the country's largest employer.