Estonia is considered the most digitally developed country in the world. We can be proud of the courage we had decades ago in prioritizing the development of the e-State. It was a conscious decision that ensured the success of Estonian citizens, companies and the country in general.
We have successfully used the image of our digital country, while also helping foreign countries build their own digital services. At the same time, in Estonia, we have remained stagnant in digital development, even though the rapid development of technology offers many opportunities and users expect more flexible services.
Who is the main leader?
So far, digital services of the state sector have been developed in such a way that each sector provides its own services. Over time, many of them have become competitive with each other, which makes communication with the state unclear for citizens, and whose maintenance costs are sometimes unnecessary. The biggest concern for the country’s digital services is the inability to agree on how to further develop the services and who will be the main leader. Each field has its desires and ambitions, but we won’t get far this way.
Take for example Bureaucrat, which has been in development since 2021. Bureaukratt is a chatbot whose aim is to make communication between the state and citizens easier and 24/7 through a network of chatbots across sectors and institutions .
As time goes by, more and more citizens want to communicate with the state when they need it and not depend on the opening hours of the authorities. Let’s be honest, in the digital country of the technological age it is also quite nice that we still depend so much on the working hours of officials, even if it is not always really necessary.
Furthermore, we often have no idea which institution to turn to. It takes patience and investigative skill to figure this out. The smart Bürokratt is designed so that people have a channel through which to communicate with the state, which knows from which sources to get answers to citizens’ questions and helps carry out complex operations.
However, the reality of a bureaucrat is different. Currently it is mainly used to answer frequently asked questions and provide simpler services. To date, only seven public sector institutions have adopted Bürokrat, and a few others have expressed a desire to join. This is a fragment of what could actually be and which illustrates very well how modest the readiness of ministries and their subordinate institutions is for a joint digital reform of the public sector.
State institutions are “isolated”, they are not ready to collaborate with others, to interface their services sufficiently, quickly and extensively in the already existing bureaucratic environment, the development of which cost almost half a million euros. State institutions do not cooperate with each other and this is one of the main reasons why our digital development is stagnant. We have a solution, but it’s not being used.
Digital reform helps create a leaner state
In the development of the country’s digital services, a so-called master plan for the country and a person in charge who makes central decisions in a commercial sense are missing. This would require central management, a single body that takes responsibility for the sector and ensures that authorities work together.
On the part of the state, we need a governing body that says what Estonia’s strategy in digital channels is and what steps we need to take within the agreed timeframes. Who should it be, the prime minister or a sectoral minister? This can be debated, but the most logical thing seems to be for the captain, or the prime minister, to take the helm. If the prime minister decided that digital reform was a priority, the picture would be clear for all to see.
It is understandable that in the current budget crisis the investments accompanying digital reform may raise doubts and even doubt the necessity of digital reform and the development of a personal state. After all, we have services that work independently. Such a vision would be extremely short-sighted, as citizens, or customers, expect simple solutions from a channel, preferably from a smartphone.
Although the development of digital reform and the mobile state represents on the one hand an increase in the ease of use of state services, on the other it represents an opportunity to make the state more efficient and streamlined.
“With digitalization, the need to maintain such a large office serving citizens disappears.”
If authorities from different sectors maintain their own digital services, which are often competing, moving to a common solution helps to optimize costs. In addition, the use of artificial intelligence as Bürokrat helps to save labor costs of officials, because it is obvious that digitalization eliminates the need to maintain such a large office serving citizens. Technology is an opportunity to make the country more efficient.
Communication with the state based on voice technology
Personal country development is an opportunity to create a new success story in the digital field for Estonia, something that has not been done before elsewhere, which can also be marketed and developed in other countries. In those countries where first level digital services have already started to work, but a further step would be needed.
It’s safe to say that the future is in smartphones and is based on voice technology, which means that state and local government services must increasingly move to mobile phones and be accessible via voice commands.
This means that, for example, in the Bürokrat application you can communicate with a virtual assistant via voice and instead of sending requests in text format you can give verbal consents for requests or services. It is important to ensure the integration of databases, which means that the virtual assistant informs itself if a document or action is about to expire and helps to carry out the action immediately without the person having to search for the institution or site web.
The technologies that make it possible to build such communication between state and citizen are no longer the future, but the present. So we don’t have time to wait, we need to get out of our comfort zone and act faster.
2023-12-06 11:44:00
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