Action Plans & Access to Case Information – Bærum Municipality
A New Journey in the Public Sector, User Focus, and Digital Citizen Services
From the Opera’s Stage Lights to the Everyday Lives of Thousands of Residents
After the years at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet, many of the goals had been achieved. The share of online sales had increased significantly, the website had become both visually compelling and user-friendly, and the work with digital channels, communication, and audience engagement had provided invaluable learning. At the same time, the field continued to evolve at a rapid pace—and with it, so did the curiosity about how digitalization could be applied in an even broader societal context.
When the position of Digital Manager in the Communications Unit at Bærum Municipality became available, it immediately sparked an interest. The opportunity to work with digital services that affect residents’ everyday lives was both meaningful and exciting. This was no longer about one stage, one performance, or one audience—it was about an entire local community and an enormous diversity of services and professional fields.
Bærum Municipality quickly proved to be like a small society within society itself. My manager at the time, Lisa Bang, told me early on that it would take at least two years to truly understand how the municipality worked. She was absolutely right. A municipality encompasses an incredibly broad range of professional environments, responsibilities, and people. Behind the websites, forms, and digital services are highly skilled and deeply committed employees working in areas such as planning and building services, zoning and geospatial data, child welfare, schools and education, health and care services, mental health and substance abuse services, home care, culture, sports and volunteering, water and wastewater, waste management and recycling, roads and traffic, parks and natural resource management, cemetery administration, emergency preparedness, property management, climate and the environment, HR, the political secretariat, citizen engagement, and communications.
As always in the digital field, part of the work involved technology and digital solutions. Episerver—which I had first become familiar with back in 2004—once again became an important part of everyday work. But the biggest and most important task was never just about the systems. What mattered most was getting to know the people, understanding their work processes, and learning how digital services actually shape residents’ interactions with the municipality.
It was in the meetings with professionals that the real learning took place. Through conversations, workshops, content development, improvement projects, and daily collaboration, I gained a deeper understanding of just how complex—and at the same time how important—municipal work really is. Digitalization in a municipality is not just about technology. It is about accessibility, safety, language, universal design, information, trust, and the everyday lives of people of all ages and in all kinds of life situations.
And that was precisely what made the work especially meaningful.
