Challenge categories

Topic #1

The connected society.

Society today is connected and interconnected, and as a private person one can get service in real time and on one’s own terms. Alongside the increase of possibilities and services offered to connect – both with others and with our environment – the expectations continue to expand throughout society. The public sector needs to step it up and get better at delivering service that is real time, responsive and personalized, as well as sustainable. 

Södertälje aims to develop new applications and solutions that utilize the possibilities of real time data that are generated in ecosystems between IoT, open data and different AI applications.

Challenge #1

IoT for the greater good.

IoT is becoming an increasingly important field to help Södertälje municipality work towards a more sustainable society within waste and resource management. For example, we now have connected litter bins with sensors to determine when they need emptying. This solution ensures that bins are emptied in time, when needed while minimizing unnecessary resources to check bins that are not full. 

Which solutions can be implemented to help us speed up the development towards a more sustainable society? How can existing processes be equipped and connected, be made smarter and more efficiently used?

Constraints to consider:

• Who would be the primary benefactor of the solution?
• How does this solution match or complement existing solutions already implemented in Södertälje?
• What are the technical-, social and economical challenges of implementing the solution?

Impact: A connected society, where insight and control is leveraged to increase efficiency and sustainability of public services.

Topic #2

Diversity & Inclusion.

Having a diverse workplace where everyone feels included is business-critical. It drives innovation and it gives more potential to find better solutions to the problems our customers are facing. We know that technical solutions can be biased, all depending on what group of people have been developing them. To ensure we are developing inclusive and unbiased digital services to be used in societies, we need diverse teams. 

Even though we have policies that regulate and outline our corporate diversity and inclusion work, everyone must do their part. Hiring managers must have the tools to make the best recruitment decisions, developers must understand how unbiased solutions are created, customer managers must think of who they give the next promotion to, marketers must think of who they give space to on external events. It’s not only about the hard facts and numbers, it’s mostly what we do every day.

For us to be an attractive company for all, we need to ensure we engage, inspire and attract girls and women to consider tech as a possible career path. In our sustainability game plan 2023, we outline our diversity goals, aiming towards a 50/50 gender balance in 2030. We know that the tech industry has been dominated by men from the start, and we know that how it´s shaped makes it easier for men to succeed. We want to change that.

Please think about: 

• During your time at Tietoevry, what in our ways of working favours male coded behaviours and characteristics over female? E.g., recruitment processes, customer presentations, development of solutions, client facing meetings.
• What would need to be changed to make our ways of working more inclusive? Try to come up with as concrete actions as possible. 

Challenge #2

Talking in the right way to the right people.

There is an ongoing war on talents. We are having a hard time even filling the open positions, regardless of which gender they belong to. But to reach our ambition of 50/50 – we will need to work hard. Recruiting more women is one part and for this it is important that the pool of talents can offer us both women and men. For companies like us, changes in employer communications and the language of job ads can help to improve the situation. 

We decided to tackle the issue at a grassroots level by revisiting our recruitment ads. By changing gendered content in the recruitment ads, we were able to increase the percentage of female applicants by 32%. This initiative was a pilot conducted in the Nordics and the plan is now to analyse the learnings and implement the initiative on a global level.

Please think about: 

• What other concrete actions do you think we as a company could do to recruit more women? (guerrilla campaigns, development of apps, fairs, collaborations) The sky is the limit!

Another important component in reaching out 50/50 gender balance target is to ensure that all talents stay with us. We need to be a place where everyone feels they get the opportunity to grow and develop, and where one can thrive within one’s own personal goals. In 2020, we hired 879 female employees (27% of total hires) and we had a turnover of 1167 female (29% of total turnover). In 2021, we had nearly the same percentage in terms of female hires, but we seem to be able to retain both women and men to a larger extent – turnover among female employees is now 20% as compared to 29% in 2020.

Please think about: 

• Reading the numbers, Tietoevry might be on positive path. What should we as a company do to ensure that all our talents stay with us? And are there any concrete and targeted actions we should do to ensure that female talents stay with us? If yes, why, and what? If not, why not? 

Hackathon’s Agenda

18th of February, 2022

9.00 – Welcome and introduction
9.10 – Eventornado explanation (mentor channel, milestones)
9.20 – Presentation of milestone #1
9.30 – Start hacking!
12.00 – Lunch break
12.50 – Milestone #1 window closing
13.00 – Presentation of milestone #2
15.40 – Milestone #2 window closing
16.00 – Closing