About SAMT-BU
SAMT-BU is a collaborative project on data-driven service development and seamless services for children and young people – from kindergarten to higher education.
The project’s full title is Felles løft: Sammenhengende tjenester for barn og unge (Joint effort: Seamless services for children and young people), and it runs from October 2025 to December 2027.
Background
A root cause of the lack of interoperability across the public sector is fragmented data infrastructure, a lack of coordination and little systematic reuse of data and solutions. This applies in particular to childhood and education, where information about pupils, parents and guardians, staff, institutions and subjects is spread across many specialist systems.
In practice, municipalities have limited ability to obtain, share and use the data they need – whether for services, management or reporting. Staff have to do manual, duplicated work, and residents have to give the same information to the public sector several times. The causes are complex legal, organisational, semantic and technical barriers.
The project is a direct response to the Digitalisation Strategy 2024–2030, which points to the need for better collaboration on digitalisation across sectors and administrative levels.
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 based in the area of children and young people.
The ambition is broad, systematic use and further development of the project’s products for all services the public sector is responsible for – not only in childhood and education, but in time also in other sectors.
Through practical trials and competence building, the project will lay the groundwork for the common foundation to be mature and well known, so that it is taken into use and built upon.
Approach and concept
The project builds on established experience, in particular Novari’s FINT (Felles INTegrasjoner – common integrations), which for several years has demonstrated a working concept for the county authorities. Three main elements characterise the concept:
- Technical architecture – an intermediate layer: New solutions and services are developed against a fixed intermediate layer, decoupled from where or how data is stored. Data is accessed where it is owned, with no need for local copies. This gives a significant cost reduction through fewer integrations and more reuse.
- Holistic and structured approach: Common information models and standardised exchange formats are defined together with the services in a common national service catalogue – not on an ad hoc basis.
- Collaboration model: The concept requires collaboration across administrative levels and sectors, with clear roles and responsibilities.
The project’s products
The project will deliver seven main products, developed iteratively over the course of the project:
- Framework for data-driven service development – common concepts, a common language, standards and a governance model with roles and responsibilities.
- Common catalogue solutions – continuation and extension of the national catalogues on data.norge.no.
- Common information models – describing key concepts and relationships in childhood and education, across municipal and state systems.
- Improved shared solutions – improvements to existing shared solutions and services, based on needs uncovered through MVPs and pilots.
- MVPs and pilots – demonstrating how the concept enables efficient development of information models and services in practice.
- Input to regulatory changes – to remove legal barriers to interoperability.
- Sharing of experience – documentation and dissemination of the project’s results for competence building and wider adoption.
Partners
| Partner | Role |
|---|---|
| Digdir | Lead applicant and premise provider. Responsible for coordination, catalogue solutions and sharing of experience. |
| KS / KS Digital | Partner and benefit owner. Promotes the needs of the municipal sector and contributes to a common architecture. |
| STAF | Partner and needs owner. Gains better conditions for guidance, supervision and handling of appeals. |
| Udir | Premise provider. Contributes to standardised reporting and data sharing between administrative levels. |
| HK-dir | Premise provider. Develops the website Utdanning.no, which gives everyone an overview of the education on offer and of the transitions between primary and secondary education, higher education and the labour market. |
| Sikt | Partner. Contributes Feide, national registers and data-oriented services for the education sector. |
| SSB | Partner. Contributes to efficient collection of statistical data and education statistics. |
| Novari IKS | Partner. Looks after the county authorities’ needs and contributes experience from FINT. |
About this website
SAMT-BU Docs is the project’s shared documentation platform. Content is version-controlled using an open standard and can be edited directly in the browser without technical knowledge – by subject-matter experts, editors and developers alike.
The site is bilingual (Norwegian and English) to support international collaboration, including on initiatives such as the Skills Dataspace in the EU.
For guidance on how to contribute, see How to contribute and the User guide. For details of the technical solution, see the solution documentation.
See also
- Project description SAMT Children and Young People – preliminary project description (download)
Contact us
If you have questions about the SAMT-BU project, the market dialogue or this website, please contact us by email:
Please mark the email «SAMT-BU» in the subject line. The project is led by the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency (Digdir), and for the time being its central mailbox is the right address.