e-Estonia

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A developed digital ecosystem

The cornerstone of e-Estonia is a well established digital infrastructure upon which secure and human-centered e-services can be built and used. The vision of Estonia’s digital development is to create a seamless digital state with the core of proactive services.

Kratt/AI: #KrattAI is helping achieve the best possible user experience in digital public services.

Cyber security: To ensure the digital continuity of the Estonian state, data embassies are established outside of Estonia. These data embassies serve as backups for strategically important datasets.

Lessons learned: Service design is an irreplaceable part of building customer-focused services.

Lessons learned: Digital-minded leadership that is determined to make e-governance a reality is needed for digitising the whole country.

Estonia’s digital success didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of decades of investment and experimentation and collaboration between the public and private sector. It is about much more than technology. The key ingredients are political will and trust. The latest study showed that 82% of residents trust Estonian e-services.

Effective and an openly governed information society

When Estonians need to access public services on both governmental and municipal level, almost everything can be done online. This makes the life of its citizens free of bureaucracy and the state functional 24/7.

Kratt/AI: #KrattAI puts additional emphasis on the user-centricity of services, improves the process of data analysis, and makes the country work more efficiently.

Cyber security: The incident report page CERT-EE was opened where people can report cyber attacks and ask for help in resolving incidents.

Lessons learned: Transparency must be upheld to maintain the trust of society, it also helps avoid data silos and corruption inside state authorities.

Digital business environment

Thanks to a variety of available e-solutions – from starting a company in approx. 30 minutes to automated accounting services along with banking – running a business in Estonia is hassle-free.

Kratt/AI: Estonian private companies use kratts/AI in several business areas for optimising business processes, automating customer service, product quality control, risk mitigation, and elsewhere.
The private sector will have the opportunity to use designated innovation and development grants for developing machine learning based solutions.

Cyber security: In Estonia, cyber security in the business sector means protecting business valuation and client relationships as a whole. Estonia provides a unique and secure business environment for companies. The Business Registry is backed by Blockchain Technology.

Lessons learned: Innovation is born out of the strong public-private partnerships where challenges are sought together and the best model is chosen for the specialists from the private sector to execute.

Estonia – the country that functions perfectly in digital mode, through any crisis

Resilience online guarantees resilience offline – tried and tested during a worldwide pandemic. During the recent Covid-19 pandemic which pushed many parts of the world into lockdown, Estonia proved to be the nation best prepared for the consequences of the pandemic, both economically and socially. Estonia did not experience a loss in efficiency or capability as other nations did. Most services in the country either are or can be provided electronically, and the remaining offline ones were updated to be available online.

This is a good example of successful public-private cooperation where the know-how of the renowned Estonian IT-sector meets the openness of the public sector experts. Estonia is open to sharing its experience with other countries to build their own digital ecosystem and national resilience.

Examples of e-services used during COVID-19:

• Paperless e-cabinet for government
• Digital signature to sign documents
• E-school solutions for continuing with studies
• Prescriptions and sick leave applications filed online, no need to go to the doctor
• Proactive family and parental benefits
• i-voting allows to cast the vote from anywhere in the world

Lessons learned:

Government e-services were used more frequently during the crisis and were made more efficient and readily available. Even the very few services that needed physical presence prior to the global pandemic, like buying and selling real estate, are now available through online channels.

Pandemics and crises may force digitalisation but it also requires political and cultural willingness to push changes live. The Estonian government organised a hackathon along with the startup community to solve challenges brought about by the crisis, leading to three fully functioning e-services thanks to the collaboration between the public and private sectors.