I am Mikko Rusama, the first Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at the City of Helsinki since August 2018.
I have over 20 years’ versatile experience within the development of digital services and products, from start-ups, to large corporations and public sector. I have held several different positions from coder, deployment and QA manager, to different leadership positions, please check the details from LinkendIn.
I thrive in and enjoy driving change. As a person, I am direct and ask a lot of questions. There is a lot of wisdom in all organisations. I try to be a good listener.
My Task
Helsinki is a city of 650 000 residents and 38 000 employees making it the biggest employer in Finland. Helsinki’s vision is to be the most functional city in the world that makes the best use of digitalisation.
In a role of CDO, I lead Helsinki’s digital transformation and create a digital roadmap that should best support implementation of the Helsinki City Strategy I will be driving both local and global partnerships that support our strategy, and to learn the best practices and share what we have learned.
The City of Helsinki should be customer-focused, providing services and information to people and organisations when they need it or even before they realise needing something (proactively). Services’ provided by the city should be naturally integrated with peoples’ lives, and provided at peoples’ terms. Helsinki can be a platform and a progressive public sector ecosystem helping new businesses to thrive. Efficient usage of data and artificial intelligence will be important enablers.
I believe that happy employees result in better service quality for the residents and other stakeholders. Focus should be put on improving internal processes and tools to support this objective.
I welcome all co-operation in making Helsinki the most functional city in the world with a help of digitalisation. We have an exciting journey ahead!
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