Estonia Sharing Its Finnish-Made E-Government Solution With Finland 83
paavo512 writes "For the last decade or so, Estonia has developed a national electronic data exchange layer called X-Road. Is is based on national electronic ID cards and allows creation of common electronic services like founding a company, declaring taxes or e-voting. Every day, over 800,000 enquiries are made via X-Road (the population of Estonia is 1.3M). According to the PM of Estonia, the solution is saving 2% of national GDP annually. The Estonian ID card technology was originally imported from Finland; however, it appears Finns have for 10 years failed to come up with any significant e-services making use of them. So it is now agreed that Estonian X-Road solution will be expanding to Finland as well."
Re:Finland: be careful! (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that that particular healthcare thing is indeed part of this larger e-Government solution.
Everyone else designed the one to throw away. Finally, there's one worth keeping. (And no, I'm not blowing my own trumpet, I had no involvement with it at all, I'm not even sure which company was behind it.)
Re:Finland: be careful! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mmmm,
I first saw what the Estonians were doing in 2001 or 2002.
At the time I said to all and sundry how amazed i was with what the Estonians were able to do on a small budget, against what the so-called giants of the technological world were doing routinely spending billions for a hundreds of invariably failed major IT projects. Estonia did have the 'advantages' of, first coming to the arena of 'modernisation' and IT integration late, second not having a heap of spare cash to blow on IT projects, third having to build their infrastructure and software ecology from the ground up, and fourth being able to integrate many disparate players (but most critically the banks and financial sector) from Day 1.
That said, what they did (on what we in the rest of the world would call 'pennies') still remains one of the most cost effective, efficient, useful and pervasive IT value adding I've ever seen. They didn't invest much in 'big metal', or huge development teams, or bring on board massive communications, hardware, and software consortiums ... they concentrated on what could be done with a small to mid range systems client-server environment running back-end database packages for Web and other open standards based front ends ... and surprisingly they coordinated it all so that it all worked together relatively seamlessly. As the elements of the system came online, they got new stakeholders onboard, developed new functionality and applications, and incorporated that into their.
The Estonians I met at a conference in Canada asked me to write a paper outlining my support for, and opinions of, their efforts, to be used to support some acquisitions they had in mind for the next government budget .... which I was delighted to do.
If any government or major enterprise is going to embark on a major IT project in the near future, I'd recommend they look at how the Estonians do it. For 1/10 of the cost or better Estonia can develop and integrate systems, and add immense value, convenience and functionality to its citizens lives .... which is way better than any other country I've seen over the last 10-20 years.