About the SAMT-BU project
SAMT-BU is a collaborative project on data-driven service development and joined-up services for children and young people – from kindergarten to higher education.
The project’s full title is Felles loft: Joined-up services for children and young people, running from October 2025 to December 2027.
Background
A root cause of the lack of interoperability across the public sector is a fragmented data infrastructure, insufficient coordination, and limited systematic reuse of data and solutions. This is particularly evident within the education and childcare sector, where information about pupils, parents, staff, institutions and subjects is scattered across many specialist systems.
Municipalities have limited ability in practice to access, share and use the data they need – whether for services, governance or reporting. Staff must perform manual duplicate work, and residents must provide the same information to public authorities multiple times. The causes are complex, spanning legal, organisational, semantic and technical barriers.
The project is a direct response to the Digitalisation Strategy 2024–2030, which highlights the need for better cross-sector and cross-level collaboration on digitalisation.
Purpose and ambition
The purpose is to establish a common foundation for collaboration and knowledge about data-driven service development and seamless user journeys across administrative levels and sectors, with piloting anchored in the area of children and young people.
The ambition is broad, systematic application and further development of the project’s products across all services for which the public sector is responsible – not only within education and childcare, but eventually other sectors as well.
Through practical testing and competence-building, the project will lay the groundwork for this common foundation to be mature and well-known, so that it is adopted and built upon further.
Approach and concept
The project builds on established experience, particularly Novari’s FINT (Felles INTegrasjoner – Common Integrations), which for several years has demonstrated a working concept for county authorities. Three key elements characterise the concept:
- Technical architecture – a middleware layer: New solutions and services are developed against a fixed middleware layer, decoupled from where or how data is stored. Data is accessed where it is owned, without the need for local copies. This delivers significant cost reductions through fewer integrations and increased reuse.
- Holistic and structured approach: Common information models and standardised exchange formats are defined in conjunction with services in a shared national service catalogue – not on an ad hoc basis.
- Collaboration model: The concept requires collaboration across administrative levels and sectors with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
Project products
The project will deliver seven main products, developed iteratively throughout the project period:
- Framework for data-driven service development – common concepts, shared language, standards and a governance model with roles and responsibilities.
- Common catalogue solutions – continuation and extension of national catalogues on data.norge.no (concept, data, service and information model catalogues).
- Common information models – describing key concepts and relationships within childcare and education, across municipal and state systems, from kindergarten to higher education.
- Improved common solutions – improvements to existing common solutions and services, based on needs identified through MVPs and pilots.
- MVPs and pilots – demonstrating how the concept enables efficient development of information models and services in practice. Examples of relevant use cases:
- Transitions between educational levels (kindergarten → primary → upper secondary → higher education)
- Interaction with child welfare services, educational psychology services (PPT) and DigiUng
- Sharing digital diplomas and credentials with the labour market
- Digital communication between kindergarten/school and families
- AI solutions based on structured, common information models
- Event-driven and automated reporting (e.g. to SSB/KOSTRA)
- Input to legislative changes – to remove legal barriers to data sharing and interoperability.
- Knowledge sharing – documentation and dissemination of project results for competence-building and broader adoption.
Partners
| Partner | Role |
|---|---|
| Digdir | Lead applicant and principal. Responsible for coordination, catalogue solutions and knowledge sharing. |
| KS / KS Digital | Collaborating partner and benefit owner. Promotes the needs of the municipal sector and contributes to common architecture. |
| STAF (The County Governor’s Shared Services) | Collaborating partner and requirements contributor. Gains better conditions for guidance, supervision and appeal processing. |
| Udir | Principal contributor. Promotes standardised reporting and data sharing across administrative levels. |
| HK-dir | Principal contributor. Better overview of connections between primary education, higher education and the transition to employment. |
| Sikt | Collaborating partner. Contributes Feide, national registers and data-oriented services for the knowledge sector. |
| SSB | Collaborating partner. Contributes to efficient data collection for statistics and educational data. |
| Novari IKS | Collaborating partner. Manages county authorities’ needs and contributes expertise from FINT. |
Critical success factors
- Building on existing best practices and experience
- Strategic commitment and genuine involvement across administrative levels
- High quality in project deliverables – without this, scaling will fail
- Follow-through on inputs to legislative changes
- A holistic approach through practical testing, not just desk exercises
- Ongoing knowledge sharing for competence-building and wider adoption
See also
- Project description SAMT Children and young people – preliminary, more comprehensive project description based on the co-financing application (download)