Lars Frelle-Petersen has served as the Permanent Secretary of Denmark's Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities since 2020.

In 2012–2017, Lars was the Director General at the Danish Agency for Digitisation (DIGST) under the Ministry of Finance, responsible for the Danish e-government strategy and its implementation across the public sector. He then led the digital transformation area at the Confederation of Danish Industries (DI), Denmark's largest business organization, as its Deputy Director General in 2018–2020.

Prior to DIGST, Lars worked for twelve years in various roles of growing responsibility in the Ministry of Finance in Denmark on large-scale initiatives and strategy for digitization and public sector efficiency. He has a master of science degree in public administration.

Lars was one of the first digital government leaders I met from outside of my own country. I had just entered the field in Estonia and made my first foreign trip destination to be Denmark as soon as I could to go see and learn from what they were up to there.

Denmark was already known for the level of digital maturity in their public sector. Starting in 2011, they were making new waves internationally. DIGST, the agency had just been set up and it captivated everyone, because Denmark had decided to make the digital channels mandatory for citizens and companies to use. The fact that such a strong step was doable in the very considerate and consensus-oriented culture in Denmark encouraged reformers elsewhere.

Lars was there at the lead of this and many other digital government efforts, also at helm of the strategy work and coordinating for digital delivery for seventeen years in the Danish government. He is a living example that effective digital (government) leaders do not have to—or sometimes even better if they do not—come from technology quarters only.

His very Nordic style of mild-mannered but relentless and patient stewarding was instrumental to being able to lead the Danish government in taking the next steps forward in its digital journey—to the absolute top of this league globally.

—SIIM

How Did You Get Involved in the Digital Government Field in Denmark?

I do not have a university degree in anything related to technology. I have a political science background and after university I started working in a very small council offering various advice to the Danish parliament.

About 2000, I ran into a guy who had been very active as permanent secretary many years ago and was now working in the financial sector. He came up with an idea to study why large IT projects always went wrong in the public sector, because we had just had a lot of scandals. We made the report together with a group of experts, and it became a pillar for the understanding of what were the problems concerning IT in the public sector, what were the learnings from some larger projects going wrong, and what should be done about it. That was my entry to the field.

At the same time, there was an understanding in the Danish public sector that if we wanted to modernize our public sector, we had to do more with IT. We had to find solutions on how to get more citizens to use IT solutions online. As a small country, you also have to be more agile than larger countries. One way of doing that is to use the IT right and bring down the costs for the public sector. We were already quite advanced in comparison with other countries: our citizens had personal registration numbers, land and business registers were there, and so on. We could build on top of that data infrastructure to get more of the public service offering online.

Based on the report, it was decided to create a joint task force composed of municipality, regional and state levels. They called together twenty-five young people—I was one of them—who came in to join the task force with my understanding of the large IT projects. The task force was put into the Ministry of Finance, and it was a very different kind of unit compared to the rest of the place. We were the first to have laptops, some mobile phones, we were sitting in open area offices together, and worked in a project manner as opposed to everlasting processes.

I was hired by the Ministry of Finance as a project leader and actually only for three years at first. But I ended up spending seventeen years in the ministry!

Was the Task Force Successful?

In 2001, people thought that within three years it would be all solved, and digitization would be a natural backbone of all we do. We realized very soon that this was not going to be the case. It was going to be a long journey to convince public institutions, in particular, but also the citizens to use this infrastructure. We did not even have the necessary infrastructure to make things work.

It was clear that institutions were too small to build by themselves the larger infrastructure they needed, such as a digital signature. So, the first years really went to making digitalization known and starting the journey. We built up the first digital signature, which was not too successful because it was too complicated to use and people did not really have anything to use it for and because the citizen-oriented solutions were not in place. We learned that perhaps even the public sector as a whole is sometimes too small in itself. The second-generation digital ID and signatures came together with the banks.

Thus, we learned to create those public-private partnerships. We first had tried to invent infrastructure for the public sector but could perhaps rather had others specify the needs and then share the solutions. We could also open up our solutions. For instance, we built up an EasyAccount or (in Danish) the NemKonto solution. It is a single register of people's bank accounts to make it easy to pay citizens money and not have every agency build their own systems and process for it. As a lot of private companies struggled with it, too, and we opened it up for them to pay their customers.

Municipalities were in the beginning quite hesitant to take their services online because they said there was nobody who would use them and no digital signature. A chicken-and-egg problem. With citizens, we had the problem of habits. It was very easy to go to citizen service centers in municipalities all over Denmark. That is why we took the bold and controversial approach to start making things mandatory to be used online.

The first thing we chose to make mandatory was digital invoicing in 2005. For the 20 percent of companies who had problems with it, we offered at the start an alternative channel where we converted their paper invoice to digital form. This led to the 2012 move where the government decided to start making all kinds of interactions digital-only between the citizens and the public sector, also between the public sector and businesses.

From the Task Force, What Led to Setting Up the Agency of Digitisation Quite a Few Years Later?

It was a stage-by-stage journey forward that had started from digital cooperation and digital communication as the task force focus. Every three years we made a new strategy, built new solutions, and then took the next step, building on top of previous work.

First, it was decided to institutionalize the task force after four years and turn it into an integrated unit within the Ministry of Finance. I continued there and became the head of the unit. The second strategy in 2004 was focused on payments, as said. In the 2007 strategy, we recognized the need for more shared digital infrastructure, such as second-generation digital ID, portals for citizens and businesses.

In 2011, again a new digital government strategy was prepared, and we proposed the target that 80 percent of all communication with the public sector should be done digitally. This was a task that required more employees, more effort, and it was decided to form a separate agency as part of the Ministry of Finance to carry out the task. The new Agency for Digitisation (DIGST) was given a role to lead the transformation of the whole public sector and cooperate close with the municipalities and regions.

What Made You Stay in the Field, and Then Step into a Leadership Role in DIGST?

What kept me in this journey was exactly that it was a journey. We had this sense of spearheading the transformation of the public sector; we saw ourselves as change agents. We saw the public sector taking on these different solutions and changes.

For me it was also a journey of getting more responsibility personally, seeing things grow, and succeed. It took me to a lot of different areas of the public sector. I worked with digitalization of our schools, health care, tax, and others to push the digital agenda forward.

Becoming the director general of the new agency was the crown of being part of the journey. When they formed the agency, I first became the deputy as a more experienced director general was brought in to start. After five months, she decided to step down and I applied.

Why Do You Think They Chose You?

A simple reason may be that I had led the work on the last two national strategies and had shown that I could make people work together. What has made public sector digitalization in Denmark successful has been that we succeeded in working together—importantly also between government levels.

The other was maybe that even if I was not the only one who had good ideas, I saw where we should head and how we could take the next step. Choosing a way where we did not try to eat the elephant in one piece, but did it piece by piece, getting closer to succeeding and being patient to do that.

I had this trust that I could combine the understanding of what technology and techniques we need and what is asked for by the political level. It is the connection between technology and politics that has to happen for digitalization of the public sector. I had perhaps the clearest idea of how it could be solved and how we could make the necessary decisions on the political level that could bring digitalization forward.

Did You Hesitate to Apply at All?

No, I had this idea from my previous work that this all would be possible. We had strong political backing early on to move forward with a digital push and also to make things mandatory.

As we were making the strategy in 2011, we had a minister of finance who was not much into digitalization. He would always tell me that he did not understand much about digitization—but it made sense to try to digitalize the public sector. I then went to him with the strategy we had worked on for a while, and his key interest was on the idea of making the use of digital solutions mandatory.

Very soon after, there was an election, and a new government came in place with new party leading it and they also took ownership of that strategy. The new government got behind the new agency creation, in particular. There was also very large ownership in the direction among the municipalities, which was quite surprising because it meant a tremendous change in how they offered their services.

Why Is the Ministry of Finance at the Helm of Digital Government Work in Denmark?

The Ministry of Finance has two main obligations in Denmark. Of course, one is to take care of the budget. Second, they are responsible for the modernization of the public sector. They have a task to improve the steering of public institutions.

They did not see digitalization first as a tool for real modernization. What happened between 2001 and 2011 was that two agendas got combined, especially with the state's financial troubles after the global crisis: the idea about efficiency and taking care of the money and the idea of modernization of the public sector became the key. How can we make public institutions more efficient, saving money to be used on other purposes, and how can we have a public sector that is modern, efficient, and trustworthy? Digitalization is the tool for this combination.

In the background, the successful companies in Denmark were becoming more global and more digital. They showed that to be successful, you must be digital. We could pinpoint to that and say that if the public sector is to keep the citizens' trust, we also have to be more advanced and digital. Otherwise, we would risk losing peoples' trust and willingness to pay taxes. We need to be with our services at the same level, as were the banks where you could get things done online. We needed to be seen as efficient as them.

In addition, the Ministry of Finance has the role to negotiate the budget every year. Part of the budget for the municipalities comes from the state level. This allowed for a big push for digitalization, because savings and investments became shared. If municipalities were more efficient and saved money through digitalization and invested into digital infrastructure with the state, they could keep some savings. For instance, when we introduced the digital post box for receiving official letters digitally, then the savings from not having to use stamps went to the state level but municipalities kept the savings from not having to handle the letters internally. It was actually a lot of money, so they had an incentive to work along with us. Through the years, we tried to become really good at finding such savings arrangements.

What Other Levers, Carrots, or Sticks Were at Your Disposal to Ensure Cooperation?

In addition to the money, we used legislation, of course. It had been a bold move when we introduced mandatory invoices first in 2005. We were quite afraid of using legislation more, until 2011. It was a big shift for the digital agenda that had not been very political until then; it had been mostly driven by civil servants only. From there on, it got more and more political.

Another lever was cooperation with the private sector. It was important, at least in Denmark, to convince the politicians that we could actually do it because there was a lot of mistrust to our ability to do IT projects. It meant a lot that we could show that the private sector was willing to cooperate with us and wanted to use the infrastructure that we developed. Things like real estate companies using the land and building registers and banks using the digital ID and signatures.

This is not a hard lever, but the sharing of success and helping out is very important to ensure cooperation. My aim was to make the agency capable of making others work with us. Because we had the stick tools of budget and legislation, it was not going to be true love. It was more a sense of respect for each other. We had to respect that other institutions had certain tasks and obligations. We had to convert that into something that we could work with and then have both of us succeed.

It was our underlining story as the agency: we make things work for different institutions. We did not steal things from them and run away with them, we did not send our minister out to say, “I did it.” It was their minister that went out and said, “See what I have done.” Once we started the projects, we made institutions part of the decision process; they had co-ownership and they put their money in, of course.

Many of the agencies, also municipalities, had the problem that they could not sell the ideas themselves. They needed us to help get going with the ideas they had. That is why many institutions were happy that we made a very bold strategy in 2011 because it gave them directions. It also meant that we had a shared sense of direction to start with.

What Became Your Own Strategy Going into to DIGST? What Did You Set Out to Be Your Objective There?

It was very important for me that the national strategy was also the agency strategy. We had the coordination for the national strategy across the board, including municipalities and regions. So, it was important for me to have the same vision and the goals widely shared within the agency and a shared view our role in it.

You Had Been There Already Before in the Agency, but What Was Your Hundred-Day Plan When You Started in the Director General Role?

The very first thing was to make operational this idea and target of 80 percent of transactions happening digitally. To have a plan how to get to the target by 2015.

The other thing was that it was a totally new agency, of course. It was formed of employees from two other agencies that were put together, and we did not perhaps share the same values, ideas, ownership of the agenda. My starting point together with my deputy at that time was to form a new culture. We set out to shift from being a traditional state agency to be a coordinating body for the digitalization agenda in the public sector working close together with other state agencies and regions and municipalities.

We did that by doing all kinds of things together as a whole agency at first. We were a small agency at the beginning, about one hundred twenty at the start. Before I left, we were about two hundred thirty and it continued to grow after I left.

We did a lot of joint planning of how to solve the path for the targets. It was a gift that we had been formed on one major specific goal and then left to work on it. Of course, more targets came our way later, but at the beginning there was mainly one target only. I reinforced the idea of cooperating because we would not succeed with the 80 percent mark by ourselves.

Then we had to work to get the agency to be known so that people would apply to work with us. We needed to attract some of the best to come to get the ambitious target done. It meant telling the story a lot about why were there and we what we needed to do.

As You Said, the Elephant Is Eaten Piece by Piece. How Did You Prioritize and Sequence the Steps? What Did the Road Map of Elephant Eating Look Like in Your Case?

I already knew that it would be important to start to do very early on something that could be successful. Even if it is small, start with something that you are sure that you can make: then you can work and build on that.

We obviously needed to review the infrastructure immediately to see where it could be scaled to the next level. We had to make sure we would have a digital postbox that works, for example—because all correspondence with the public sector would start to go there as opposed to your physical mailbox.

We then tried to identify low-hanging fruits toward the 80 percent target. We looked at what kinds of services were already used online, where the citizens were capable of using services online. We decided to pick out the services used by young people, of course, instead of retirement funds or such, where we would have interest groups against mandatory digitalization. For instance, we selected the service of young couples applying for maternity leave, where 50 percent or more of them were already doing it online.

We aimed to build confidence this way and use more time to develop out the more complicated ones. We needed to use this time to also remove blockers for next services. For example, one of the strongest lobbyists against mandatory online services were organizations for the elderly. We started seeking a dialogue for them, and they ended up starting to have elderly teach the elderly to use the solutions. It was a tremendous success, and they were prepared when the mandatory solutions finally reached them as the user group, too.

Did You Have Surprises along the Way?

We actually ended up seeing that the use of online services by the elderly was much higher than by young people. We had thought that it would be only natural for young ones to receive and read letters in the digital postbox, because they were already online. But it was the elderly who took it very seriously: they got educated, and they were very keen on using the digital postbox. Instead, the people between fifteen and twenty-five never opened the digital postbox because they did not think that they would get any important letters from the public authorities. They were in other messaging channels instead. We then had to work to get them to learn to find the right way to use the citizen portal and postbox there.

Another thing was that we all had thought that doing the digital postbox and services mandatorily would be more problematic with citizens than business. It turned out the other way around. Businesses can be very different from one another and the size can be very different, especially. Sending a pizza maker around the corner a note to the digital postbox is quite easy. Sending a postbox note to global logistics giants like Maersk or other Danish multinational companies is quite different. We solved a lot of these problems as we went along, but we had our ups and downs.

Did Politicians Stay behind the Strategy All the Way Through?

In the end, yes, but that was yet another reason for us to sequence it out how services would become mandatory.

I think at first not enough political people realized what we set out to do with the 2011 strategy and the 80 percent goal. Once the government realized that we would have to be going back to parliament every year with each new wave of services to make them mandatory, they got afraid that we could really make it happen.

Thus, we started by saying that we would first do only eight services mandatory by 2012, then next fourteen by 2013, then forty by 2014, and the rest in 2015. We made a promise to come back to the parliament every year to tell them how we have succeeded from the year before, and if it was good enough, then we were allowed to make the next legislation. This was a way to deal with some political hesitance and also to retain the buy-in by transparency.

Politicians often have that sense that when they have decided on something, it is already realized. However, if you made a decision today, you may see the solutions come live perhaps three or four years later. That normally will be after the next election. It can be difficult for politicians to accept why it can take so long, and too often us as public officials are too optimistic on how fast we can have new solutions in place. At least I can say that we have become more realistic and open that it is complicated. It has a lot to do with habits and culture; it is not just about introducing a new technology. You have to get an organization to work differently, and you have to convince the politicians on why it takes time to make it happen so.

That is why in my kind of role you have to work on a short and a long agenda. You have to think on a launch program where you can launch new things every year. At the same time, you have the possibility of taking a longer time on the things that require it, without getting a lot of questions about them. You have to have output; you have to deliver things. Small things are part of larger things; each one a step in the process. The waterfall model is often not a good idea when it comes to the political agenda.

How Did You Build Out Your Team to Achieve All of That?

I look for people who can make things happen in a very complex environment: getting skilled people around me who have different competences, who can bring things to the table, who have had different perspectives and experiences.

We could get a lot of people who wanted to work for us because we had these large technology projects, and we could show that we actually succeeded. If you want to work with the big tools, then you want to work with us. That was a good storyline.

I have to admit that DIGST team mainly came from the public sector. In more technology-based units, people could come from financial sector or anywhere. But what I discovered was that when you have people working in contact with other agencies or at the political level, I had more use of people who had the skills of working with the public sector already. They could either come from consultancies or from some other agency, where they had shown that they could actually make things happen.

On a management level, in particular, I looked for public employees who had shown that they could transform things, not just push papers around. They had to have what I was looking for in the willingness to cooperate. You can find a lot of people who have the habit of pushing others away so that they can show that they are the successful one. I looked for people who could make people work together and be successful together.

With the technical people, we had to protect them against red tape. We needed to attract certain people who just were not good at red tape. In the beginning, this was a bit complicated for us. A lot of people got scared because we made everyone write reports. We learned very fast that this was not a good idea. Some people are good at writing reports; others are not. We did not see at first that there should be the division of labor between teams focusing on building the infrastructure or deploying it, and other teams who took care of the political process.

At first, we were like a start-up company where everyone does everything but soon had the division of labor set up. We learned how to have all these different kinds of talents working together and have a shared agenda.

Who Was Your Most Valuable Hire through the Years?

I hired a very good deputy director general who succeeded me afterwards—Rikke Zeberg. She actually came from other parts of the public sector. We had been colleagues in the Ministry for Finance, then she had worked for the Danish radio for a while.

She was a very good public servant in comparison to me in a sense that she had control of the paperwork. This was necessary to build trust for our agency, that we were in control of what we were doing. She mainly handled the administration of the organization to begin with and from there developed the understanding of digitalization in general. We learnt a lot from each other. My role at that time was to have the ideas, the vision, and the leadership; she was very good in building up the organization to make things work. She made us very well organized in comparison to other agencies.

As we grew, we got more and more institutionalized, we started to have more and more maintenance of the solutions we built. I started to think about how we could stay innovative and not just renew the same infrastructure once again. What I tried from time to time was to put somebody else to lead such teams.

Say we needed to build a new generation of digital identity. The most obvious thing to do, in a way, would be to put the current manager in charge of the work. I found out that they would often just say that maybe we should build the same solution and do it slightly better; why reinvent the wheel? However, sometimes we do need to rethink the whole thing. Often, it was best to take somebody from the outside who had not worked with that technology to come in and ask the questions, and then maybe lead the things in a new direction. We needed to ask ourselves again the questions that we had stopped asking.

You Have Already Said a Bit about It, but What Was the Culture You Wanted the Team to Have?

I kept saying and wanted the people to really grasp that we were at a specific spot in the history. That they were there to change things and to make an impact. We were not there just to get paid. I told the story that we were part of something bigger. If we work together on this, we could succeed and bring the public sector to a new level.

Many of us who are hired by the public sector, we already think we are there for these reasons. At least we think that when we start. Sometimes we forget that after a while because we either get mixed up in red tape or institutionalized. That is why we have to be constantly retelling the story why we are here, why it matters, and where we are heading, how we should change that.

I have said it already: I also had to explain that we were not going to succeed with all of it by ourselves. We needed to cooperate with others. In fact, we were part of a lot of others. “Cooperate with others to make things work” was the mantra.

Because we were part of the Ministry of Finance, we were also very business-case driven. The DNA of the ministry is that if we wanted to come up with a good idea, it is not enough that the idea is good. It should also have a business case around it, either in an economic cost-benefit sense or it should be about a better service. Then the institutions who will deploy this solution will be willing to pay for it. Transformation will happen if we can get the cooperation of others and others also to pay for it.

That ended up being how we also prioritized our ideas internally, too. Every year we had a process in which everybody could come up with ideas for the work plan. Many, many good ideas came up, but many of them could never be brought to life because nobody would pay.

I emphasized the need for good infrastructure and wanted everyone to respect it the same way. We could find all kinds of solutions that could give us quick wins or have others pay for it, but if we did not have good infrastructure, we could not develop anything out.

What Are You Most Proud of Achieving as the Director General?

To see today that digitalization has become part of the solution of problems. We see it in Denmark as an integrated part of problem-solving in the public sector. Of course, digitalization has a lot of problems, such as surveillance, echo chambers, and things that are related to how we use the technology. But in general, using technology can be part of the solution.

Of course, I am also proud that a lot of technologies we built do make life easier and still do today. Our EasyID or (in Danish) NemID is used every day. We managed to go through COVID-19 by using technology in almost everything we have done. We have gotten to a level of maturity in the use of technology that makes all this possible. It all has been possible because we were able to build trust—in DIGST, in digitalization—by becoming more successful and doing what we promised.

What Is Something You Most Regret or You Think You Failed At?

I would have hoped to set up the next mission after the 80 percent target. I failed in the strategy we made afterwards that came out in 2016. It was very much about the maintenance of the shared infrastructure. I had hoped to set up new ambitious goals.

For instance, I had hoped that we could give citizens and businesses an expectation on how fast we would make decisions in the public sector when they handed in a form.

The problem was perhaps that we had had very big success by doing the strategies in cooperation with different layers of government. We had done the strategy work the same way four times by that time. For the fifth time we also tried the same way, but we should have realized that the political scene had changed. Suddenly dissociation was a problem, and the municipalities were afraid to set more goals together with us. We should have realized that people were scared that the next level after the 80 percent target was reached would mean that we might take away the decisions and the responsibility from the institutions, that we will centralize things even more, that we will close some municipalities down because we digitalized everything. They only reluctantly came along to make the next strategy, and the outcome was not that ambitious because of it.

The new strategy should have also had even more work in the direction of the private sector. We should have recognized that we cannot innovate everything ourselves; we should free up data and open the market up more. In utilities and especially with the climate agenda, in health care, in education. I did not fully understand the market while in the job; I had been groomed differently. I only first understood when I left the public sector in 2017 that if you want to have innovation also in the future, you have to feed the market and help the market to interact with you. Tendering makes it very difficult for the market to innovate. I am not sure that I fully understand it even today, but at least I can see now.

Another thing I regret is that we were underestimating the issues concerning security, all the way back to 2001. We came to this understanding through problems. We had a certain naive understanding that digitalization could only do good. Today we know it can do both, and no we have to work on that. Back then we did not see it coming.

What Made You Move on from DIGST in 2017?

Part of it was the feeling I had about the new digital strategy. I told myself that maybe it was time to hand over the keys and have somebody step in to rethink how we should make strategies. I had carried the stick to this level, and now the way we should do things from here should change.

Remember, I also had learned to ask myself who was the best to be put in front of any new project, and sometimes it was not the one who had led the former one. Maybe that is also the reason why I changed myself, because I had done the same thing now too many times.

I say I have never left the digitalization agenda, especially because I am back in government now. But you have to recognize when it is time that you have to give the sticks to someone else.

How Did You Make Sure That Things Will Last in DIGST and with the Agenda?

I hope that I made sure that when the time came for me to leave, it would not be important anymore if I was heading it. There was good staff in the organization who could continue our work. There also had been a generation shift and it has continued since then, because the agency is still very successful and doing a very good job. They are launching some of the technologies we decided on doing back in the strategy in 2016. For example, the next generation of digital signature just started being implemented in September 2021.

What Are the Skills Necessary to Be Effective in This Kind of Job?

You could go to this job from very different skills, but it would help to understand technology, of course. In addition, it is very hard to be a top manager of an agency without a very, very good understanding of how to interact at the political level and being part of the political process. This takes experience.

We have seen it when people come from private sector and have never worked within the public sector. It is just too difficult to navigate. In the private sector, you can make decisions by yourself. In an agency like DIGST, if you want to make large decisions, you have to convince others to be part of it, or they will more or less block you.

Of course, you need to be a skilled top manager to take on the role. You have to build up a very good toolbox, with experiences on how to cope with different situations. Otherwise, you will be like Bambi on the ice in the cartoon - falling flat all the time.

You need to recognize that institutions that have to change, have to build up the capability of transformation. There have been many cases of promises for digital transformation and then three years later scandals in Denmark. Why? Because in these cases, the institutions do not know what their capabilities are for transforming; they do not train or transform their organization.

If you play football, you practice for the tournament. If you are a doctor, you have to be skilled to do an operation. When it comes to digitalization, people often say that you can come in from the side and perform anything. Actually, you have to deal with culture, institutions, rules, long traditions, often with employees unwilling to transform. Technology itself cannot transform anything.

Institutions have to acknowledge that they need to have the people who transform the organization, step by step. Otherwise, these very rapid transformations of public institutions often fail or maybe succeed only for a short while, then they return to the old habits.

In Addition to the Skills, What Are Your Three Recommendations on How to Be Effective in This Role?

First and foremost, have clear goals. Where are you heading? What is your success? What have to be or can be the quick wins to show that you are on the right path?

You have to make things successful for the customer, for the citizen so that they can see a change. I think many public institutions do not think very much about the final customer; they are just there. There is no competition with others.

Another thing is that it is so important to be capable of cooperation, at least in my experience. I have said it many times: you cannot succeed by yourself. How can you make others part of your success? Either by stick or carrot, the right tools or making the right incentives.

The third point, maybe, is to build simple solutions. The private sector often has a better understanding of the end user. When we failed in creating very simple things, it brought hard work after.