From Silos to Services - City of Turku

From Fragmented Services to a Unified Operating Model

Across industries, organizations struggle with fragmented data, siloed structures, and limited visibility into value creation. Cities face these same challenges on a larger, more complex scale. Public services are shaped by political negotiations, legal constraints, and operating systems that are not solely driven by efficiency. These conditions make transparency, consistency, and cross-system coordination critical.

The City of Turku in Finland set out to rethink how municipal services are defined, managed, and governed, transitioning from a department-driven organization to a unified, service-based system with a holistic, lifecycle-oriented approach. To this end, Turku uses Aras Innovator to model public services as products, promoting transparency, consistency, and strategic control throughout the organization. This approach also enables the city to operate more coherently as a connected system rather than a collection of separate departments.

About the Organization

Turku is Finland’s oldest city and a major urban center with a diverse population, including a large student community. Like many public-sector organizations, Turku operates within the Nordic welfare model, providing a broad range of services, including education, healthcare, social support, culture, and infrastructure.

In 2023, Finland’s national well-being services reform fundamentally changed how cities operate. This reform transferred significant responsibilities to municipalities and increased pressure to deliver more coherent, citizen-centered services with constrained resources. For Turku, this was a catalyst. Rather than adapting incrementally, the city launched “Uusi Turku” (“New Turku”), a long-term transformation program to modernize its entire governance and operating model.

Inspired in part by Finland’s national AuroraAI program, Uusi Turku is based on two reinforcing principles: people-centered leadership, which focuses on citizens’ holistic needs throughout their lives, and business-centered leadership, which strengthens the city’s economic vitality and attractiveness. The program is based on the belief that resident well-being and a thriving local economy are interdependent and that good governance must serve both.

Pain Points

Before the transformation, Turku faced a fundamental structural problem: it lacked a unified understanding of its own services. Each department managed its own offerings, data, and processes, resulting in fragmentation rather than coordination. This resulted in:

• No single source of truth
• No unified view of existing services
• No clear understanding of how services relate to each other
• Fragmented data across departments
• Limited transparency on resource allocation and costs

Different departments described similar services in different ways, making comparison and coordination difficult. Financial planning was only loosely connected to actual service structures, while data remained fragmented across organizational boundaries. The limitations of this model became especially visible in services that extended across multiple departments and providers. Many citizens’ needs could no longer be addressed through isolated services alone, but required coordinated service paths spanning multiple offerings and touchpoints.

Take childcare and early education, for example. From a citizen’s perspective, these services appear as a single entity, but they actually involve multiple actors, delivery models, and access points, from municipal daycare centers to private providers and digital application processes. Yet internally, these elements were managed separately.

Similar patterns existed in elder care and urban mobility, where infrastructure, digital interfaces, and operational processes form interconnected systems. But as citizen needs become more complex due to demographic changes, digital expectations, and social challenges, the limitations of this model have become increasingly evident.

Recognizing this, Turku concluded that improving individual services would not suffice. A fundamentally new way of structuring and governing the entire system was required.

“We had good services before, but they were organized in silos. That meant we couldn’t see the full scope of our city services.” Juha Malmivirta, enterprise architect, City of Turku

PLM Requirements

To move beyond fragmentation, the city needed a structural backbone to connect services, data, and decision-making processes across the organization. This required more than a traditional IT system. Turku needed a model that could:

• Define services consistently across departments
• Capture how services are delivered, including resources, processes, and access points
• Manage services throughout their lifecycle, from design to adaptation
• Connect operational data with financial and strategic planningIntegrate with existing
• systems, such as SAP, web platforms, and national infrastructures

The city looked beyond the public sector for inspiration. Turku asked itself, “How would a company solve this problem?” The answer pointed toward treating services as structured, configurable entities, managed across their full lifecycle, much like products in an industrial context, but adapted to the realities of public administration.

This marked a decisive shift in mindset: from managing individual services on a case-by-case basis to managing value creation across the entire service lifecycle.

Successes with Aras Innovator

Turku selected Aras Innovator as the backbone of its new service model. Instead of managing physical products, the platform is used to model and govern municipal services. Each service is structured with its variants, whether they are delivered in-house, outsourced, or in hybrid forms, along with their associated resources, dependencies, and access points, including websites, booking systems, and physical locations. This creates a system that reflects how services are delivered and experienced by citizens.

Rather than acting as a front-end application, Aras Innovator functions as a governance layer behind all service data. Information is maintained centrally and automatically distributed to the city’s digital touchpoints, including the city website (turku.fi), national service platforms, map and location services, and booking and library systems. Integration with SAP and data warehouse environments connects service structures to financial processes, laying the groundwork for more coherent planning and procurement.

The platform currently manages hundreds of services and approximately 700 access points. In addition to providing visibility, the system establishes a shared language throughout the organization. Departments that previously operated independently now work on a common data model, enabling coordination where silos once dominated. At the same time, service data is linked to data warehouses and business intelligence environments, providing a clearer understanding of resource allocation and financial flows. This is where the transformation becomes tangible: services, operations, and finances converge into a single, coherent system.

The implementation of Aras Innovator was carried out in close collaboration with Fulvisol. They supported the City of Turku in designing the service data model and defining the system architecture. Fulvisol also played a key role in translating the conceptual service model into a scalable, operational platform.

“This is not just about technology. It’s a fundamental shift in how we think about services, transforming them from isolated offerings into end-to-end value for citizens.”  Juha Malmivirta

Results

Turku’s transformation is ongoing, but its impact is already evident. For the first time, the city has a comprehensive, structured overview of all its services. This transparency, knowing what services exist, how they are defined, and how they connect to each other, represents a fundamental shift in how the organization understands itself. Decisions that were previously based on assumptions or incomplete departmental knowledge can now be informed by consistent, shared data.

Collaboration across departments has improved significantly. A shared data model has enabled coordination where silos once dominated, not because structures were reorganized, but because a common foundation makes collaboration both possible and necessary.

For citizens, services are easier to find and access. Information is consistent, up to date, and available across channels. The structured service model also provides better guidance for more complex, multi-service needs, which Turku calls “service paths.” This reflects the program’s core ambition to address the full range of life situations rather than isolated requests.

The most significant strategic impact is still taking shape, but its direction is clear. Turku is transitioning toward service-based budgeting, in which resource allocation is tied to the structure and value of services rather than organizational units. This opens up the possibility of dynamically evaluating service portfolios, aligning capacity with real demand, and integrating financial constraints into long-term planning from the outset.
In this sense, Aras Innovator is more than just a system of record. It is enabling a new governance model.

“We don’t use PLM for products here. We use it to manage services used by all citizens.”

Soile Keinänen, project manager, Fulvisol

Looking Ahead

Turku’s experience illustrates that the true difficulty of digital transformation in the public sector lies not in technology, but in structure. The city is establishing a model in which services are continuously designed, managed, and improved as part of an interconnected system. Over time, this approach will enable more adaptive, data-driven, and citizen-centric decision-making.

This approach is powerful because it is transferable. The underlying challenges, fragmentation, lack of transparency, disconnected decision-making, and pressure to do more with less following national reform, are not unique to Turku. They are shared by municipalities across Europe and beyond. Turku shows that these challenges cannot be solved by optimizing individual services in isolation but by rethinking how services are structured, connected, and governed.

In short: The city is learning to operate like a system.

“Financial managers now have a much clearer picture of where the money actually goes.”

Soile Keinänen

Contact us to learn more