Higher productivity, greater transparency, and happier civil servants. F2 is different because it is built for government, developed through close collaboration with a number of ministries to create a standard system they can simply plug in to support their work.
F2 was designed from the ground up to meet the specific user needs and processes required for government workers. F2 helps civil servants get more done each day. It takes the pain out of managing the essential things like mail, messages, documents, meetings, approvals, submissions, and checklists.
F2 goes beyond document management and archiving to provide a complete production platform for government work.
Denmark has been recognised by the EU as the leading digital nation in Europe. The Danish approach has been driven by a combination of mandating digital citizen services through legislation, and encouraging user-driven collaboration.
F2 is an example of a standard platform that has emerged through rapid user adoption across organisations. There was no central mandate to use F2, but departmental leaders recognised that F2 provided a more efficient way of supporting core government needs. And because F2 can be configured by business users, it was fast and easy to implement in very different government organisations.
The Ministry of Climate and Energy and the Ministry of Transport jointly received the national digitisation award for their F2 implementations, both for the quality of the implementation and the productivity gains realised.
F2 started life as a joint development project between cBrain and the Ministry of Social Affairs in 2006 and then the Ministry of Transport in 2009. The Ministry of Climate and Energy followed, implementing F2 in just eight weeks, and recently the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has rolled out F2 globally at over 100 locations.
Today ten Danish central government departments, including the Prime Minister's Office are using F2. The Danish Agency for Digitisation and many other agencies have also deployed F2, which means that improvements made for one organisation can rapidly be shared by everybody.
Recognising that a kind of"club" was forming, the Danish Agency for IT worked with cBrain to develop a shared cloud service that offered increased service quality and reduced IT costs by over a third.
Thomas Egebo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Climate and Energy, believes F2 has helped him personally save a much welcome two-and-a-half hours a week.
Jacob Heinsen, Mr Egebo's counterpart at the Ministry of Transport, agrees that the software has also increased departmental transparency and civil servants? job satisfaction.
"In the past, once employees had finished their work on a document, perhaps to provide an answer to a parliamentary question, they would give it to their boss. But they did not know the status and location of that document in the overall process," he says.
Jacob Heinsen explains: "With F2, we have increased our transparency. Civil servants can follow the document?s progress in real-time, right up to the permanent secretary and minister, and back. For the employee, that means they can also track the productivity of their boss."
The transparency has actually helped improve user satisfaction. It is unusual for employees to admit they are happier two months after the introduction of a new case management system.
But 62% said they were satisfied with the ability to find documents and files (up from 12%), 81% were satisfied with the knowledge sharing (compared to 7% previously), and 37% said the new system had increased their overall job satisfaction.
Before the F2 production process was introduced, you could almost follow a document's progress by where it was being printed. This, along with multiple copies of documents being shared meant there were 25 times more documents in e-mail than in document management systems.
F2's adoption has almost eliminated the use of internal e-mail - 50 per cent of all communication in ministries is now through chat rather than e-mail.
F2's impact on productivity and ease of use has enabled senior civil servants to show leadership, and be an example to the rest of their organisations.
Danish experiences show that change is more successful if it starts at the top. Whether that?s by the Foreign Minister approving documents securely from his iPad while travelling, or Permanent Secretaries insisting that their office no longer accepts printed documents, it is the top management that makes change happen. If they walk the walk as well as talk the talk, the rest of the organisation will follow.
But leading this change is made easier by adopting a production system that is already in use across other government organisations.
Departments can just re-use what works, rather than having a long IT development project or trying to knit together a patchwork of different point solutions.
Which means more time can be spent on harvesting the benefits and less time wondering when, or if, the project will deliver.
Perhaps Shakespeare's famous quote in Hamlet should read: Something is successful in the state of Denmark?