CIO interview: Taavi Kotka, former CIO, Estonian government

Building a digital government

So how has Estonia done it? A lot of it, Kotka says, has to do with trust and willingness to try.

“There has to be a certain level of trust, and people need to trust that the government is actually able to do these kind of changes,” he says, but adds that “it’s also a question about how you approach those problems”.

In Estonia, there is an inherent belief in digital, both among residents and government. In healthcare, for example, if your doctor has all the relevant information about your medical history, they can treat you better.

“If you believe that, then it’s a question about how to solve that in a way where it’s not a privacy issue, and technology allows you to do that,” says Kotka, adding that in Estonia, they have achieved something the UK is desperately trying to do: all of the country’s hospitals are connected, meaning patient data can be seamlessly transferred and accessed by an appropriate clinician.

When it comes to creating digital services, a key focus is often skills, or rather the lack of them – particularly among the elderly, or those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

In the UK, there is talk of a skills divide, where millions do not have digital skills and 5.8 million people have not used the internet at all, which is costing the economy approximately £63bn a year.

Digital skills less of a problem

Kotka takes the view that although digital skills are “quite important”, it’s not as big of a problem as it was 15 years ago. In many cases in Estonia, people aren’t given a choice on whether or not to use digital services.

But Kotka adds that this is simply because the citizens of Estonia prefer using digital services, and the government has shut down the physical offices because they’re no longer efficient.

“It’s still a problem but it's not a huge one. I have noticed that many western countries, also the UK, are always using this as an excuse not to go to the gym,” he says.

“You should solve the problem for 80% and then worry about the 20%. So you shouldn't put the 20% in the first decision. Don't use [the skills gap] as an excuse not to go to the gym.

“One of the key success elements for e-government is never try to find a 100% solution that fits for everybody. You need to understand that if you start designing your solutions and services for, say, 85% of people, you will be way more successful than trying to design everything for 100% of the population.”

He adds that the Estonian approach is far from as radical as in Denmark, where it’s a “digital only” approach.

Digital identity

Estonia has been flying the flag for digital for a while now. It’s more than 10 years since the country introduced paperless government meetings, and nearly 100% of the population hold smart ID cards to prove their identity when accessing online services.

Kotka, who has been keeping an eye on what’s happening around digital identity in the UK, and the UK government’s development of Gov.uk Verify, says part of the reason it has been a bit of a struggle, is that it’s been made into a political question – a huge no-no according to Kotka.

“You have to differentiate between engineering questions and political questions, so the UK has made an engineering question a political question,” he says.

“You cannot build a digital government without unique identifiers, so it’s an engineering thing. Don’t make it political. As long as you make it political, there won't be any digital government or society in the UK.”

Estonia’s e-residency programme

The smart ID cards in Estonia were the forerunner to what Kotka is probably best known for – the Estonian e-residency programme, which was launched in 2014.

An Estonian e-residency is a transnational digital identity available to anyone in the world interested in administering a business online, and in 2015, the country began taking e-residency applications, giving ID cards to foreigners, providing them with access to government services.

So far, there are nearly 40,000 e-residents from 161 countries around the globe, including more than 2,000 from the UK, with 206 of those having established new companies in the country, according to its e-residents dashboard.

Kotka says Estonia needed to do something to improve the economy and increase the wealth of the country and its people.

“You can do that through different methods. You can increase the amount of tourists – which is a big problem for us,” he says, because the Estonian climate makes for an unpopular destination.

The second is through immigration, but again, he says “no one wants to come”. The third is through increasing the amount of births, but Estonia has a negative birth rate, he adds, “so we had to come up with something new”.

Reaching beyond Estonia

He believes they can reach people further than Estonia. “Why can’t we serve people from anywhere in the world who want to have business in Europe?

“Those were questions we asked ourselves, and decided to create an e-residency which is not like a visa, or the Schengen agreement, but allows you to access all our business environment, plus legal, and all of our APIs and services.”

For British companies, which after Brexit want to do business with Europe, Estonian e-residency is wide open, he says. Estonia is open.