- Country: Greenland
- Population: ~56 thousand
- Project timeline: Initial project 28.05.2018–31.12.2021 (ongoing enhancement, support and maintenance)
- Customer: Greenlandic Agency for Digitisation
- Funding: The Government of Greenland
Project Background
The government of Greenland, Naalakkersuisut established a strong foundation for improving digital government in a strategy document “The digital society - national digitilisation strategy 2018-2021”. One of the goals of the strategy was to establish a joint and secure exchange platform for the country’s digital data.
The goal of this project was to pursue government digitalisation by establishing a joint and secure exchange platform for Greenland’s digital data that would then make it possible to exchange data nationally and internationally with Danish governmental institutions. Sensitive information provided by Greenlandic governmental institutions (such as Hunters’ Registry, Fishing Registry, Nurse and Doctors’ Registry, Persons’ Registry, Tax Registry, national ERP system, etc.) could then be exchanged securely between consumers and providers of data, without the risk of unauthorised persons viewing or influencing the data. Another major goal of the project was to integrate this platform with the citizen portal (Sullisivik Portal) which could act as a single window for all e-government related functions.
Cybernetica’s contribution
As the prime contractor on this project, Cybernetica implemented its Unified eXchange Platform (UXP) data exchange technology for Greenland, with the localised name Pitu. The project started with a pilot agreement, after which several technical workshops were carried out. The first organisations were selected and joined the initiative to use the secure data exchange platform.
Following the success of the pilot, a full-scale deployment began. During this phase, some of the basic data registers were only made available through Pitu, encouraging uptake of the platform. This is a similar approach to what was used in Estonia to boost the adoption of X-Road, and which helped Estonia digitalise.
Pitu is the Greenlandic word for the front strap on a dog sled. The front strap creates the link between the dog sled and the dogs. A simple, but absolutely crucial, device that ensures that the dogs’ leads are assembled and secured, so that the musher can steer them in the right direction.
Pitu officially went live in February 2019, connecting key government information systems containing sensitive information without compromising security and data ownership. For the full-scale deployment, it was important to have a resilient government perspective and ensure availability. The governing components of the data exchange platform were installed in two sites, including on Azure Cloud. Availability of these governing components is essential for enabling the data exchange between organisations. Therefore, redundancy was used to ensure the availability of the registry services. The synchronisation process ensures that both primary and secondary sites provide the same data. In addition to UXP components, the message exchange depends on certification authority and trust services: timestamping service and OCSP service. Since Greenland did not have a governmental Certification Authority (CA), Cybernetica's Certification Authority and OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) solutions were used in both test and live environments.
During the course of the project, Cybernetica provided extensive training, maintenance, software upgrades, custom software development, and support for the software, including a second level support service. Cybernetica continues to provide ongoing maintenance and support.
Project impact
- Pitu enabled the modernisation and digitalisation of government, and emergence of citizen-facing e-services in socially and economically important sectors. For example, in Greenland, hunting is an important activity both for the livelihood of the people and the economy of Greenland and the hunters register is seen as a crucial public service. Other public digital services introduced included digital moving, registries of medical practitioners, digital post and digital patient journal, etc.
- Since Pitu makes the base registers available to government agencies, there is less need by said agencies to compile duplicates of the registries. Instead of asking the citizen to provide base data over and over, the government can query the necessary data directly from the registries.
- The citizen portal (Sullisivik) was integrated as a convenient single window for all governmental online services and this was enabled by the deployment of the secure data exchange framework.
- As of 2023, there were 26 information systems connected to Pitu and 88 services available.
Want to know more?
For more information about this project, see the following or get in touch!
- Estonian news press release from 2018: Estonia's Cybernetica to develop data exchange system for Greenland
- Cybernetica news release from 2019: UXP-based Pitu enters full-scale deployment in Greenland