The Church of Sweden: When a giant goes digital

“The parishes had their own ways of doing things”

The Church of Sweden is a gigantic decentralised organisation where each parish has a lot of independence. Ten years ago they decided to increase their effectiveness and start working better together. They needed to focus on being a church and cut down on heavy administration. It’s a real challenge to get 33 000 trustees and 22 000 co-workers in approximately 1 300 parishes and 13 dioceses to digitalise and collaborate in a new way. But they are close to pulling it off.

The goal

Their goal was mainly to increase the quality and security in the handling of documents, data entry and filing – as well as centralised support. The Church of Sweden handles a lot of different cases which makes quality in the administration extremely important. They also have to consider the principle of publicity.

User-friendliness is key

The Church of Sweden started implementing Tieto’s Public 360° in 2015. The solution entailed a gradual transformation to digital administration of everything from incoming cases to data entry and filing. Together with Tieto they layed out the specific needs of The Church of Sweden and how to tailor Public 360° to meet them. The system went live in June 2017.

Arguably, the most important aspect of a big digitalisation process it the user-friendliness of the system. The Church of Sweden chose to gradually implement Public 360°, where each diocese got to decide on their own level of ambition.

But Magnus Edin highlights the user-friendliness as a big reason for the smooth transition: ”we noticed an increased amount of data entries right away. It is a user-friendly system to begin with and together with Tieto we made it even more accessible to our users. It is also easy to teach to new users,” he says.

He continues: ”my experience is that most questions we get are about which data to enter and not how to do it. That shows that the users have been able to start working with the tools right away. Our favourite function is that we can enter case data directly from our e-mail client, which is useful in many situations.”

Public 360° version 5 - a vastly improved user interface

During fall 2018, The Church of Sweden upgraded their Public 360° to version 5.0. Magnus Edin compares it to upgrading from Word 2010 to 2017. It is the same system, but with a vastly improved user interface and even easier to use.

”There are a lot of new settings where you can adjust the system to your preferences even more than before. The client also feels faster,” says Edin.

He also mentions the app, which improves the handling of meetings with trustees outside the church. People that might not use Public 360°.

”It has made it a lot easier to handle invitations and share protocols. The process is more efficient. And nicer,” he says.

The next big implementation of Public 360° is in january 2019. At the end of the month, 12 out of 13 dioceses will be using the system.