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Tuesday, 19.03.2024
eGovernment Forschung seit 2001 | eGovernment Research since 2001

A tiny Baltic country tries to automate everything smartly.

This former Soviet republic thinks of itself as a country in the cloud and its politicians think of its government as a service.

The newly independent Estonia maximized its legacy as the home of the Soviet Institute of Cybernetics, betting big on high tech and startups to counter a flatlining 1990s economy. By the turn of the century, all Estonian schools were online, and today students as young as 5 learn coding skills through a course called “Programming Tiger.” That knowledge base is complemented by a mandatory electronic ID card system that gave digital public services the benefit of scale from the beginning, said Gunnar Njålsson, a research expert in public technology management.

The result: Estonia is a world leader in digital public services and, via an e-residency program established in 2015, the Estonian government is now also an export industry.

“We want you to have an entirely online relationship with the government, from the birth certificate onward,” Chief Information Officer Siim Sikkut said, comparing his country’s efforts to the advantages Silicon Valley accumulated over other private tech clusters in the 1960s and 1970s. “If you want to monitor how your kid is doing at school, you do it via an app on your phone. If you want to pay for parking, you do it from your phone. You can vote from wherever you are in the world. All your utility transactions are available online,” Sikkut said.

After leaving empty-handed, I asked about the gap between the rhetoric and reality.

How well does the country’s promise that it is redesigning government translate into everyday reality? POLITICO visited Tallinn to test the systems and swap notes with Sikkut.

While it is not compulsory to use digital services, Njålsson said that because Estonia designed its services based on citizen input instead of the top-down approach used by many other countries, the connection citizens feel to the services is more robust than in other countries and take-up rates are high. “It’s like using your credit card,” former Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas said.

For several years, more than 95 percent of Estonians have filed their tax returns online, and Estonians voted online from 116 countries in the last national election. Since banks started demanding Estonians use their e-IDs to access internet banking, use of the government card has become ubiquitous.

When I applied to become an e-resident of Estonia out of curiosity, like several thousand of the country’s 18,000 e-residents, the response was swift. Within a week I was approved and invited to collect my residency card.

After heading into the suburbs of Tallinn, I waited 15 minutes in a ticketed line at a government office that resembled an airport lounge. The staff was friendly but bemused that someone would travel thousands of kilometers to collect a small blue box containing instructions, PIN codes, the e-residency card and a “Welcome to Estonia” pack.

When I called SEB bank — via Skype — to ask if I can use my e-residence card to open an account online, the answer was no. As a non-EU citizen, I was also warned it will cost me €250 to open an account.

The next morning I arrived at SEB’s Tallinn branch to apply in person. Within five minutes, I was chatting with a bank clerk who had bad news for me.

Because I didn’t have a permanent address or company in Estonia, the clerk didn’t trust who I was or where my money came from. “How do we even know who you are?” she asked. My passport, my POLITICO payslips and my Estonian e-residence card did not count.

When I explain my reason for wanting an account — dissatisfaction with Belgium’s banking options — the suspicions only grow. So much for the EU single market.

After leaving empty-handed I asked Sikkut about the gap between the rhetoric and reality.

“Money-laundering rules turn banks risk-averse,” he said. Estonia’s neighbor Russia has a noted money laundering problem.

Government communication officers I spoke to noted that the e-residency program was designed for companies looking for an EU base. It’s not yet fully functional for occasional visitors to Estonia.

The still-developing program has not struggled to attract applicants. There are more than 18,000 e-residents, who created around 1,600 companies in 2016-2017.

Company owners express satisfaction with the system.

“You can get the company registered in minutes instead of say, Italy, where it can take a year and a half,” said Jorma Tuomainen, CEO of a technology consulting company based in Finland.

That doesn’t satisfy Sikkut.

“We compare against what we could be, not what others do,” he said.

Estonia can take its connectivity vision to the extreme: A piece of pension software exists solely to manage the special pension rights of Estonia’s 13 Olympic gold medal winners.

But beyond Olympic aberrations, the real goal of Sikkut’s work is to make government services invisible through linked data.

In reality, much of the benefit for citizens isn’t from nifty services. The gains come from no longer having to travel to get things done.

The government calculates that e-government achieves a cost savings of 2 percent of GDP each year. The boldest saving claims include hospital waiting times cut by one-third and digital elections that cost less than half their analog equivalent.

Increasingly, only high-risk transactions involving the government — like getting married or selling property — still take place in person.

“Even a no-contest divorce is online,” Sikkut said.

The logic of government services is also challenged.

“If 99 percent of people qualify for a pension at 65, why would you ask them to apply for a pension?” Sikkut said. Instead, pensions should be something you decline, rather than something you apply for.

Fundamentals like doctors visits are set to be redesigned, too.

“We want to create a Booking.com for all private and public doctors and hospitals in Estonia, and eventually across Europe,” Rõivas said. “We want you to be able to type in that you want to see an eye doctor on a particular day, within 100 kilometers, and get the answer about who is available. We want you to be able to obtain your prescribed drugs without always having to go back to visit the doctor for the green sheet of paper.”

The final Estonian secret: Don’t leave the revolution to software engineers.

“It is a change in management, not tech work. A messy process put online does not make it better,” Sikkut said. “If you automate stupidity, you just make stupidity faster.”

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ryan Heath

Quelle/Source: POLITICO, 23.05.2017

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