Yesterday Siim Sikkut and Kristo Vaher shared insights into creating an interoperable digital government to an international audience of policy leaders and experts at the latest round of Digital Nation’s webinar series on how to become a digital nation.
Kristo Vaher, Estonia’s former CTO divided the key to success in interoperability into 3 main categories:
🧩 Decentralised Architecture
🌐 Cross-Border Readiness
📑 Open Source Standards
If you missed the session here are 9 key takeaways that Kristo Vaher, Estonia’s former CTO and Digital Nation’s Technical Director presented for you to get started on your path in creating interoperable digital public services:
1. By integrating decentralised architecture you gain the ability to migrate technology.
2. A byproduct of decentralising your systems is creating cybersecurity which is fault tolerant.
3. Even if you decentralise your systems in play, you can still maintain central governance of your product stack.
4. Designing your systems with cross-border compatibility from the get-go enables you to be prepared at no extra cost, whilst preparing you for the future.
5. In an international world, shared languages enable shared business opportunities to prosper if the architecture surrounding the businesses ecosystem allow it by being interoperable.
6. When starting out, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Examples like GovStack, X-Road and federated data exchange are options for getting off the ground.
7. By procuring your systems using open source standards you may gain the right to IP.
8. Even if you can’t procure the services open source, you can still implement adapters to enable interoperability.
9. The lessons you learned can and will help someone else along the way, with any chance yourself in the future, so share and publish the fruits of your labour along with metrics.
“Interoperability isn’t a tech challenge: it requires policies and legal rules, careful change management, stakeholder engagement and governance, etc. That is why a good comprehensive interoperability roadmap is required, which also has to feature good showcase quick wins of new good interoperable public services,” Siim concluded, summarising the experience from several countries where Digital Nation has helped to kickstart or restart interoperability in government.
Case Study: Zero Paper Côte d'Ivoire by 2030
How to get a country to become paperless in less than a decade?
This is what we set out to answer with Côte d'Ivoire this past year and here's what we learned.
🚩 The government of Cote d’Ivoire has done some considerable work over the past years to build an initial set of digital services and introduce the core legal framework elements. However, the fundamental principles, policy and technological foundations required to implement a fully digital government were not there yet. The foundations of digital governance were not ready and actual digital service offering was very limited.
📝 Digital Nation crafted an ambitious yet achievable vision for a Zero-Paper Cote d'Ivoire by 2030. By realising this vision, Côte d'Ivoire has great potential for becoming the Continental front- runner for public service availability and quality. Cote d’Ivoire’s government will always be open and accessible for its citizens. This all entails significant reductions of bureaucracy whilst saving money and time for everyone.
📈 Digital Nation mapped the country with our Nation’s Digital Governance Future-Readiness Framework which takes 12 pillars of Digital Readiness into account to build a solid foundation for the whole-of-government approach to full digital transformation.
📌 Based on the assessment, we developed an effective and impactful digital government roadmap „Zero Paper Cote d’Ivoire by 2030“.We composed the roadmap with a dual-track approach to lay the foundations for transforming the whole government fully digital and at the same time deliver quick wins in parallel.
🌍 By implementing this vision and roadmap, Côte d'Ivoire will become a digital leader in Africa, in alignment with the nation's aspirations. This leadership entails not only offering a wide array of digital public services but also ensuring their availability and quality, ultimately translating into tangible and positive impacts on the lives of its citizens.
🤝 We'd like to thank the Honourable Patrick Achi, the Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire along with his office and SNDI - Société Nationale de Développement Informatique headed by Nongolougo Soro for entrusting us with this mission and DIGITAL AFRIQUE TELECOM for partnering with us to deliver this roadmap.
Digital Nation 1st Birthday
Last week marked an extraordinary milestone for Digital Nation as we celebrated our first ever birthday as a company and what a year it has been!
A year ago, our partners Üllar, Siim, and Taavi had a vision to create a company that could prove that any government, with the ambition and readiness to act, can become a digital leader and have a tremendous impact in just a few short years. They believed that by combining the experiences of Estonia, the world's first truly digital society, with the best practices from around the globe, a successful and future-proof digital society can emerge anywhere. With this mission in mind, Digital Nation was born!
Looking back on our first year, we're proud to say that Digital Nation has come a long way already - even if still only starting. We owe a big thank you to our amazing team who have been the driving force behind our success. From the initial spark of an idea in the heads of three founders, we've grown to a core team of 10 with offices in Tallinn and Nairobi. Along the way, we've also built a network of over 100 experts, 10+ advisory companies, and 10+ tech partners, which gives us the confidence to tackle any digital transformation challenge at every scale.
Second kudos goes – of course – to our clients who have entrusted us with their digital transformation journeys! In our first year we worked on 13 impactful projects, working with 10 clients across 6 countries and 3 international organisations. Plus, an uncountable amount of speaking gigs on different stages to build the likeminded coalition around the globe!
We have launched several client engagement models from quickhand assessment of digital readiness and roadmap creation to implementation support, expert-in-residence services on-site, and even hosted immersion tours in Estonia.
We have been focusing on the African and Middle East regions mainly. Why so? Well, our main driver is to contribute where we can have a real impact and in these parts of the world we have seen the most hunger for this so far.
As we are continuing our journey to our second year, let's take a glimpse into the future.
We are in the process of exploring new challenges, clients and partnerships - while taking our existing relationships to new heights. We are expanding our reach beyond the current regions, with plans to launch in another area soon this year. But shh, let's keep that under wraps until we make it official!
We are committed to growing our internal capabilities. As we don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, we will be continuing to develop our own unique offerings to provide maximum value and deliver the highest impact for our clients.
If you want to hear more or discuss how you can benefit from our expertise in building future-ready digital societies – drop a line and let’s have a chat!
