Follow the digital government space long enough and you will hear about Estonia. Despite being a small country of 1.4 million people with an overall economy that by total size is only 101st in the world, it is a powerhouse in digital government services. In the most recent United Nations e-government ranking, Estonia ranks 2nd in the world, and has been in the top 10 for many years. 

So what is it about Estonia that has allowed it to leapfrog into being a global digital government leader? 

On this episode we’re going to explore this question with those who have been on the front lines of Estonia’s digital government revolution.

We’re speaking to Estonian Minister of Justice and Digital Affairs Liisa-Ly Pakosta who was recently appointed into that role in July of this year. She has an interesting mandate as both the digital government lead for Estonia as well as leading the Justice portfolio. 

We also spoke to Siim Sikkut, who was the CIO of the Estonian government between 2017 and 2022 and was one of those responsible for the development of Estonia’s e-residency program in his prior role as an advisor on digital government to the Estonian Prime Minister.

And we also heard from Ville Sirviö, CEO of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, the non-profit that leads development of one of the core pieces of digital infrastructure in Estonia, the X-Road.

You can also find the full, uncut interviews with Minister Pakosta, Siim, and Ville on our Let's Think Digital YouTube channel.

This is the first of two episodes on the Estonia digital experience. Watch out for our next episode where we delve deep into the topic of trust as a key ingredient for modernizing government.

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ9Tl4c-uUo

Related Links

• Minister of Justice and Digital Affairs Liisa-Ly Pakosta
• Digital Nation
• Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions
• “There is no blockchain technology in X-Road”, blog post from NIIS
• E-Estonia
• “How it all began? From Tiger Leap to digital society”, Education Estonia

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and introductions

03:17 Liisa-Ly Pakosta and the Estonian experience

07:25 Siim Sikkut and e-residency

20:31 Ville Serviö and X-Road

26:13 Getting past bureaucratic and political blockers

37:25 Improving the foundations

50:14 Conclusion

Ryan 0:04

I'm Ryan Androssoff, welcome to Let's Think Digital. For anybody interested in digital government and modernization, the example of Estonia looms large in the imagination. In the most recent United Nations e-government ranking, Estonia ranks second in the world and has been in the top 10 for many years. If you follow the digital government space, you probably know about Estonia for things like their e-residency program, where anyone around the world can access a secure digital identity and access services from the Estonian government, such as setting up a business there. In fact, Estonia is often held up by politicians and senior public servants as an example that Canada should emulate.

Recording 0:48

Have you ever heard of Estonia? Well, Estonia, 30 years ago, was a digital, rather, was a Soviet Republic. So in 30 years, Estonia has gone from a Soviet Republic to a digital Republic.

Ryan 1:05

Liisa-Ly Pakosta 3:15

Ryan 5:33

And I think what's also interesting, from what I know of the Estonian story on this, is, if I can put it this way, there's been a political consensus around the importance of digital. Because I know there's been transitions in government, but it seems, you know, consistently over the last 30 plus years, administrations have been pushing this forward.

Liisa-Ly Pakosta 5:53

Yea, you are close to being right. There is no total, so the far right is against it. So the far right is trying to build anti trust against government, and sometimes is using also the same bullet points that Russia is using, that governments cannot be trusted. So this anti trust movement is, is there.

Ryan 6:21

Which we see everywhere in the world.

Liisa-Ly Pakosta 6:22

Which we see everywhere, but at the same time, the digital way of offering the services is so good, everybody feels and sees how good it is for citizens. And no politician, it's very hard to go out as a politician and say, We want to like to make you worse services. No one does that. So that has held the political constituency is that the services actually are good for people, and people feel, see, we were talking about freedoms. So one thing is that you save so much time if the country is not bureaucratic, and if it's digitalized, and people value the time they can use this time with their families, with hobbies, and it would be really, I think, very hard, to turn it the other way around, because then it would be like you have to take again a week to fill in your, your tax declaration, which you now can do with less than a minute.

Ryan 7:25

Siim Sikkut 8:38

Ryan 9:49

Siim Sikkut 9:51

Absolutely, yeah, and I want to come back to talk a little bit about your time as CIO and some of what happened there. But I did actually want to ask a little bit about those earlier days as well, and even when you were working with the prime minister as an advisor. You know, one of the things we talk a lot about is the fact that when we're when we're looking at digital modernization, you know, it's, technology is part of it, but it's really about this bigger culture change in terms of how our organizations work and the mindsets behind it. And I'm wondering if that was true in Estonia as well? Is if that's part of the Estonian story, you know, to what degree did the actual bureaucracy have to evolve itself, or were people kind of already conditioned to be thinking about working in a different type of way.

Well, there's a there's a lot in there and, well, first of all, let me just share how I think about culture myself, right? So I really think about the culture is like the sum of our practices. So in a culture is basically like we what we see based on what we do, sort of, or what you see based on how we do things. So if you talk about culture, and that's this, I don't believe that you can, like, you know, raise culture by, like, an educational program of propaganda, for example. I mean, you just have to start doing things different. And obviously you can train people do stuff different and support that. But you know, the incentives, the everything, the leadership, the governance mechanisms, they have to align to enable this difficult practice, then the culture can be created. So in Estonia case, there's also, well, two things. First of all, obviously, ther's, there's a sort of culture, meaning, like a set of practices, how to get stuff done. Again, as a, perhaps a small country, we always had this urge of, you know, getting stuff done because you're not getting anywhere otherwise. I think that has also helped the digital transformation sense, right? Because, you know, you're focused on how to solve things in a way. Secondly, we did take conscious steps also to bring more of that digital transformation practices in. For example, how the tech companies or startups work? How do you do agile or iterative development or, you know, as opposed to fixing all programs at once, like governments want to do with reform packages. You start really from, like, you know, minimum viable solution first, for example. So more and more these took roots as well through when, like I said, after we started restarting the practices here. So in a complicated way, I'm trying to say that there's been efforts to really build a different kind of practice. This has taken some route. But even if I go around all the things that people change, as we all know, right? So it's like a never ending effort you gotta take because not everybody comes in with this sort of it ready-made culture ready to go. You constantly have to incentivize, educate, work with them so they could actually, like, do a good job in a sort of, you know, proper sort of way, and to get transformation done. So this, we still see that entities, or honestly, ministries at different levels of that maturity, and if people move, then you can go even back sometimes. So it's like I said, it's a never ending effort, and that no country is fully ever done in that sense.

Does that, do you think that that the size matters, the fact that Estonia is a relatively small country, and I assume you know the civil service is relatively small, does that make it easier to be able to make that kind of change internally?

Well, to some degree, for sure. Look, because you know, to get any decisions done, there's less people to convince it's a numbers game, a bit in that sense, right?

And less people to say no on the other side.

But that's what I mean. That's people to convince, right? So, whether on a political level or or among the peers in administration level or whatever, but at the same time, you know, if you're tiniest of countries, you also have, you know, talent barrier, right? You have a talent, you know harsh conditions that you will just basically have to work with the people you do. In Estonia is the same thing we've, had to work with the people we have in that sense. We, I always envy countries that are bigger than us in that sense. So my point being that it's not like for granted. So being small itself doesn't give you that edge, it can help, potentially, to make decision making especially fast, and you need to make, like, a lot of bold decisions if you want transform but it's only an enabling or helping factor, not a guarantee done deal.

Yeah, no, that's I appreciate that, and I think that that's helpful perspective, in terms of how that cuts on both ways. Well, and speaking of making, you know, bold decisions, or taking kind of unique approaches, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was the e-residency program. Because I know this was something that you were involved with during that time when you were an advisor to the prime minister, and I think this was 10 years ago now that, that Estonia launched its e-residency program, I'm wondering, for people who aren't familiar with it, can you explain a little bit about what that is and what the what the innovation was behind it?

Well, we happened to be recording this on the second of December, right? Comes out a bit later, but actually it's 10 years ago yesterday that we launched it. So it's literally like, like a birthday time. E-residency, in a nutshell. Look, it's basically we, Estonian government. I can't say we anymore. The Estonian government gives digital key to anybody in the world who wants to basically do cross border business, for example, without any middlemen and so forth. So let's say you Ryan, you could apply to get a student digital identity, the digital entity, the government issues, and that's your key to then services online that the government or the private sector partners provide, like, you know, banks or noters or whatever. And the primary target group, indeed, is entrepreneurs. Because, you know, for them, it's especially that tubing cross border business is still quite a hassle, especially if you want to be like, you know, for example, a professional freelancer, you could reside anywhere, and your global clients can be global, but to then work with them, get the invoices paid, whatever like that it's a hassle. So having good services for that in a good business environment, for example, that you can run the company from a distance, and it's everything easy, like you know it is for Estonians otherwise, that's the sort of idea. So we give you a key to have hassle free, basically, management of the companies, for example, and the services, but I still say our government and private sector provided the government, for example, handles like a company management, the registrations and taxes and stuff like that, everything else beyond from accounting to banking, or let's say payments to whatever is then private sector sphere on top of it. So it's like a platform to enable private digital services offering as well, and why it matters is, first of all, it reduces the friction of getting things done in business life, we have about 120,000 e-residents over time, through time. They've come really, like I said, because they've been freelancers wanting to roam the world and but still have any needed jurisdictional anchor, or, they come because at their home countries, I'm sorry to say, it's so hard to start business, or they need to be trusted in cross border business. Like, you know, we had a lot of Ukrainians, even before this awful war, come in and set up a company to Estonia. And then they did like e-commerce or coding and whatever, to clients abroad, many different use cases, but the whole idea you have a very easy to use, safe business environment and access to the services with a digital key. That's e-residency.

Another really interesting thing about digital services in Estonia is what connects it all together behind the scenes. When you look at the suite of digital services available in Estonia, whether it's e-residency, automatic filing of taxes, online voting or e-health records, there's a high degree of interoperability and data sharing between those services that you just don't see in a lot of other jurisdictions. What makes this all work is a piece of technology called X-Road. Anyone who's heard about Estonia's digital government accomplishments has no doubt heard about X-Road in the same breath. So what is X-Road? I'll let Ville Servio, CEO of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions that develops and governs the platform, tell us all about it.

So X road is a centrally managed, distributed data exchange solution which provides you with the software that enables you to set up a national data ecosystem which can involve all of the society, including the private sector, the public sector. Usually it's a data ecosystem facilitated by public administration, but it's essential to have also the private sector as part of the ecosystem to get the full benefits of X-Road. So a solution for building a data ecosystem for easy and effective data sharing secretly.

Right, and I understand security is a big part of it, right? It is kind of ensuring the security of that data. And that, you know that the system, from my understanding, is it's never really been compromised, right? It's been able to withstand a lot of cyber attacks over the years.

As far as I know, it has never been compromised as a system. So, of course, there might be some independent information systems part of the ecosystem which could be target to some attacks, but to say it would be compromised or anything really be put down. I don't think that's ever happened with X-Road. So it has been up and running since 2001 and I guess it has been really tested in practice.

Because it is, you know, if I've seen some diagrams before of kind of the the infrastructure of X-Road. And so my understanding is, as you mentioned it, you have public sector and private sector who can all be together to share data, you know. So you have to use your digital identity for doing your banking, or you could use it to vote in elections. But if I understand right, each of those different databases, essentially crypto, cryptographically, is kind of secure in its own piece, so that even if one part of it were to get breached, in a way, it doesn't get access to the entire system.

Well, yeah, X-Road is distributed, so it means that every organization sets up its own access point component, which is technically speaking, a security server in X-Road, through the security server, taken access technically all of the other services in the ecosystem, but this technical access does not provide any access to data yet. So the data exchange parties always agree upon the data exchange between each other and the data exchange also takes place between the two security servers of those organizations. So there is no central component as a kind of single point of failure or anything like that. It would be in a risk. It has central components for managing the ecosystem, but data never flows to the central components, and that's what makes X-Road secure.

And when, you know, when people hear about distributed systems these days, people talk a lot about distributed ledgers and blockchain now, does X-Road use blockchain, or is it a different type of technology for distributed systems?

It doesn't use blockchain, and I wouldn't call it a distributed ledger either. And we actually have two blog posts already from 2018 in which these myths are busted, because it has commonly put up in the news that X-Road would be a blockchain solution, but it's not.

Right, and I've heard this before, too, and I didn't think that it was, yeah, okay. We'll find those blog posts and put them in the notes for the show, so people could take a look at that up there and so, okay. So, myth bust. No blockchain as part of X-Road, but it is still a distributed system, but you're not a distributed ledger?

Yeah, just a distributed system. And what is most important to understand about X-Road is that it's not a data exchange or data sharing solution only, but the main idea is to form an ecosystem. So that's the real goal, that you actually have a large ecosystem of different participants who can continuously benefit of being already connected, to utilize, produce and consume different services within the ecosystem.

Right. And so your institute, as you said, is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit model, and you're you're sharing X-Road essentially, with different governments around the world. Do you, couple of questions about kind of how that this model works, which I find fascinating. So do you do actual implementation with them? Will you, if a country came to you and said, we want to implement X-Road within our systems? Do you provide the technical advice and assistance to them to be able to do that?

We don't actually do that. So we are a software development organization. So we developed the X-Road core. And the countries that have implemented or will implement X-Road they usually do it by themselves, and they might find some help from so-called X-Road technology partners. So we have a program for companies that have experience in X-Road. And it's really useful for any government willing to explore X-Road or to implement it, that you already have existing resources. Besides that, we have released lots of materials for anyone interested in X-Road, like we have a free online academy for learning the fundamentals of X-Road and their specific courses for server administrators and different roles involved in the maintenance and implementations of the ecosystem model. So we are never part of the implementations, but we just released the software as open source. It's fully free, no license fees. Anyone can just take it and implement it, also free for Canada and any of the states here. So we are really looking forward about that.

As much as we often associate digital with technology. The truth is that these things are never just about the technology. They require political will and navigating bureaucratic systems, and as we've talked about before on this podcast, building and sustaining political momentum is one of the hardest and most important ingredients to digital modernization of government. I've seen this firsthand from my time working in the Canadian government and in my work now engaging with leaders at all levels of government. So how did the people working in Estonia get through these political and bureaucratic blockers to get initiatives like e-residency off the drawing board and actually implemented? I wonder, when you were going through the process of setting up the e-residency program, was that, you know, was, was that a difficult process to get approval from? I imagine there must have been some legislative involvement to change some of the laws around it, you know? Or, again, is this something where the size of Estonia benefited the ability to move quickly on something like this?

Well, I guess, to our taste, it's been, even that's a very slow 10 years. We would have thought we would be even further than that, in some ways. But obviously things like COVID and have intervened in the years. But well, first of all, you're right about digital diplomacy side of things. I mean, there was always, like, a nice side effect that, you know, suddenly you get this recognition, like even, like country recognition more. You had more friends in the world, etc. But we still want to say that the main target was to make the economy bigger, and so to really have more business going through our country and bringing business to this country as well. And that has really, what has happened, and you know, which means, you know, more like, the return on investment for government is basically taxes. So the return on investment every year is about five to seven times, I think, through the history. So it's like revenue generating from government point of view. But beyond that was really the sort of the idea was the other thing that, like, you know, let's, let's start small and figure this out. So it was very much like an experimentation, how we also approached politically. So if you asked about resistance, or, you know how easy it was to get it done, what was they had quite a bit of pushback initially. And that's natural, because if that was risks involved, like, how do we make sure that I don't know money launderers are not coming to make abuse this sort of opportunity now? So we had to build proper safeguards in and that took a bit of time and and, but fundamentally, on a political level, a leadership level as well, we got supports, and they say, let's try this out. I think this has been very instrumental throughout different points of Estonian time history, like X-Road originally, or online voting for parliament, there's been moments before decisions I said, Okay, so there, or might be risks involved. There definitely. I mean, we don't know if it's gonna work, but let's try to figure this out. So they enable this experimentation, really. And when you experiment, then you can, you know, sort of, you know, fail a bit, fail fast, ideally, as I say, right? You iterate then correct, improve. So we built the e-residency with the startup approach in mind, consciously in terms of what was the method of development. And like, you know, how did we expand the offering? And like, we didn't need to have a, we didn't want to have a perfect thing from the start, because that wasn't probably possible. We had to really get to the market and then see what works. And that thinking was alien to the government. In governments you for, also for political reasons, you try to cover all but so you try to figure out all the risk you're gonna have. You know, everything has to be like foolproof. You know, how come it's not ready when you launch? Well, that's how startups do it. So we were able to bring this in, and that took quite a bit of... fight, and also bureaucratic hacking, to build a team that was sheltered like that, that could work in a different way, and then also to make other departments all the way to, like, you know, police boards, or somebody who's very conservative for good reasons, to adjust and work with that sort of mode of working. So that's been like, the cool part of it has been like, contributed to the success, and that's what I think now we've been able to emulate the next areas quite a bit to like you said, that's the sort of culture, the practices we have then have been able to use more.

Right. And is it fair to say that now, those practices, that culture, has become fairly common across the Estonian government?

Well, as I said before, I mean, it still is uneven, because I still say people change, right? So even, let's say an e-residency say, look, that's like the fourth or third generation working, and not even, let's say in the core team, but for people around. So it's like, you know, you constantly have to, have to work on that, because the incentive, let's say, the say, the natural, the instinct of governments is not to be, for example, agile or iterative, or, you know, your budgeting works against that, your risk management works against that. So, you know, the machinery of government needs to constantly be tinkered or improved to really make it like the status quo in there.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, you're bringing up this important part, which is, yeah, it's human beings, at the end of the day, right, who are behind this. And kind of, you know, recognizing that they have to come along on that journey becomes an important part of it. It's something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, I think in recent in recent months, you know, speaking of the human journey, I'm kind of thinking about your journey as well. And so, you know, you spent this period of time as an advisor to the prime minister, and then, as you mentioned, in 2017 you became CIO for the Estonian government, and you held that position for about five years. I'm curious in your time as CIO, is there anything that really stands out to you as as projects or initiatives that you're most proud of that you were able to shepherd through the system?

Well that's a well, I'm proud of a few things. I also think that I'm proud of a few things we failed at in a good way, because these are good failures in a way. But I think if I tried to look back in a sort of innocent way, but we were able to get some next, next wave things going, which was the intent that they still, you know, there's still major programs, even in the government currently, two years later, when, when I have left, in a way, the first thing is that we very clearly made a strong effort to, uh, to fix the foundations. So in Estonian case, the legacy had been building up, there was not enough investment being done into, like, you know, constant iteration of systems and things. We were able to fix quite a bit of patches on that, like we worked on, like, you know, how to change governance and financing mechanisms for that, etc. So, I mean, we started this, there's still lots to be done on that to really secure, because you have to constantly secure what you built, and then that new things on top, not just the last ones, but, uh, but that was the part. And to me, coming also into the government CIO role, I mean, having worked in tandem with my predecessor, I had sort of this idea, obviously, what the role is about. But, you know, the amount of effort is we really had to put then do all this sort of like, you know, existing stack and of services and technology and like, you know, really fortifying that. That was still a surprise. And so I think to do anyone out there, because almost no government starts from scratch today, even if you go in with an innovation agenda, sort of want to do the next cool things. I mean, that's what you gotta be ready for, just like the daily unsexy stuff of making like the foundations better all the time, because that carries you longer.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that'll probably be of comfort to some people listening to this. Because I, you know, I know, certainly here in Canada or most countries around the world, people spend a lot of their time dealing with legacy systems, kind of worried about that. And, you know, I think there probably might be this misconception to say, Well, you've gotten Estonia, you know, which is a relatively new country, didn't have a lot of you know, was able to start fresh in some ways, you know, 20-30, years ago. But the fact that you still had to deal with a lot of technical legacy probably makes people feel better that that's just a little bit of, just part of the reality of modern life, right? Any kind of large organization is going to have some kind of technical debt they have to deal with.

And look, I mean, I would even the emphasis the technical debt. It's the debt of the organization and a procedure, like how we do things and that sort of stuff, right? So even if you transform something, you know, I don't know, at some point, let's say '99 you move to online, tax, or whatever. So that gets stuck, that immediately becomes a legacy, because that's not now how you do things. You need want to change that, you need to break that. So that sort of tendencies. I mean, everything is immediate legacy once introduced, basically. The other things that but, but on that note, a few things that we were able to start was clearly a strong artificial intelligence efforts. You know, look to 2018-19, onwards, we, when we defined, you know, what is our national strategy on that? And then the approach was to say, hey, let's really get the experimentation in public sector going. Like we, even before we were regulate, we have to understand what we're dealing with. And then we have this hunch that, again, given the size, because of the biggest, you know, value of AI is productivity. You know, it should be like a natural picture stone, yeah. And so we were able to get dozens and dozens of like, you know, experiments going. Many of them actually became live applications later, all the way to what is the hashtag Burokratt, that's Estonian program of now that's still ongoing, that how to make virtual assistant, AI based virtual assistant as the interface to the government or services, or information of government. So think about like, you know, you get everything from from a Siri in your phone, for example, anything you need to get done with the government. So that was a major move. In parallel, we started to move to to really redesign a lot of services around life journeys end to end around them. So like, you know, your kid is born, it should be like one interaction, not three or five online, even if they're good ones. So beyond that, we started like an architectural change when we want to, like micro services to enable all of this to have been able to basically build those sort of live journeys together, like Lego pieces, etc, etc. So there's, like, that sort of stuff we got going and and I still say that I'm proud that it still goes in some ways, it has taken longer, perhaps because, again, people have changed afterwards, but, but with the government is still on them.

Yeah. But the you're feeling fairly confident some of those foundations are in place now, the people that can be built on top of?

Well, they always have to be improved. I mean, so the fact that, again, you have something, as I said, it becomes a legacy. So we spoke about X-Road for a bit. I mean, and perhaps for anyone who hasn't still heard about X-Road, then it's not really, perhaps a platform underneath and everything runs on. It's a data exchange mechanism to really change data. Then, you know, for whatever services out there. So it's like a specific digital public infrastructure piece in a way, or layer. Now, X-Road is currently, there's a version eight of that is being built. So my point being that even if you had something in back, your needs, your requirements, your government changes, you need to upgrade, also your foundations all the time, otherwise you get stuck. So this is my example that I mean, this is the same everywhere, right? So, and in some ways, we also got stuck in a few places, like Cloud transition was quite painstaking because systems were not ready for that and still not going, for example. So that was the idea we had to change the notion that even if you have the foundations, the foundations need constant improvement work. And I think that's what I'm a bit proud that we managed to get that across.

The foundations need constant improvement. That statement absolutely rings true to me, fixing the plumbing, as we've talked about before on this podcast, which goes much beyond the technical debt that people often talk about. It's equally about shifting the culture within government, including modernizing the structures and incentives of our public sector organizations. Updating our laws and policies, rethinking the role of public servants in the digital age and building trust with citizens to help give government the license it needs to make these big changes. It's really validating to see then that as we dive deeper into Estonia's journey, we learn that their approach to digital government hasn't just been focused on the technical. It's also about tackling the legal frameworks to be enablers for modernization. This is especially true today with artificial intelligence pushing against the outdated policies and ways of working in many governments around the world, and forcing us to start rethinking some of our assumptions. So let's go back to Minister Picosta to talk about this dynamic, who has a unique perspective on these issues, given her very interesting ministerial portfolio that combines both justice and digital affairs.

Yes, we made a change in Estonia this summer, and we put together the classical Ministry of Justice, and then we had Ministry of Economics and Digital Affairs. But we took the digital affairs and put it together with justice. So now we have a Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs. The reason behind this, the change was that, basically, very much of the digital state, or the digital services, is now based on legal issues. So when we want to go on with using AI, for example, we have to solve a lot of legal issues to protect basic rights and basic values that we have in our society. So, for example, the European Union AI act, we see it as it enables us to offer even more, even better services, even more personalized services. But to do this, we need new laws. We need need new norms, and for this to be in a made in an innovative way. So the best solution was to put the digital side and the legal side together to help the innovation to go on in the way that really all the basic rights and values are protected.

It's, I mean, I think it's a fascinating approach in philosophy, because, you know, traditionally, when governments created digital ministries, you know, they tended to be linked to either economic development or, in some cases, service delivery or policy organizations within within the government. And I think you're right. Like one of the big challenges we have is, how do we actually update the laws and the structures of the state. And I assume Estonia is probably one of the first places in the world to actually combine digital with justice into one portfolio?

One of the first, yeah, not the only one at the same time. But again, I fully understand it was a good decision from the beginning to have it like connected with the economy side, but because most of the innovation comes from private companies. So it's fully understandable, but nowadays, especially with artificial intelligence. So the technology is so advanced. So to go on with public services, better public services for our citizens. We need to have changes also legally. We have to see how to safeguard the basic rights, the data rights, so but at the same time, while securing the data rights and other basic rights we have to ensure that there is room for innovation, and that is why we put these two things together.

I mean, I think that's one of the real challenges around digital and a lot of jurisdictions is, you know, preserving data and ensuring that we can kind of ensure privacy and keep trust while still having that room for innovation. And I know you just came off of the keynote address you gave here at Forward50 at the conference that we're attending, and trust was a really big theme for you. And if I kind of understood your message, it's that trust is an essential ingredient to having a digital state.

Absolutely, trust is on what the whole state is built on. You can't have Digital State without trust. People have to trust, and you have to design a system that can be really trusted to every detail. So that's fundamental. And again, talking about the legal side of this, it also has to build trust. We want to be different from China. That's absolutely clear. We are a democratic country. We want to be and we are on the top of democratic countries. So it means that our laws, our justice system. Everything has to ensure that people can trust the digital services, the digital state. To build trust, there are different possibilities. For example, in Estonia, we use the possibility that everybody who has given data to state, for example, medical data to your family doctor, or your children's data to registry or whatever, so you can check very easily who has looked, who has taken a look on your data? There is a very easy interface where you can go in and you actually see that this person, at this time, took a look on my, for example, car data in my car registry. And if that person did not have legitimate interest for that, so this person gets punished. So everything is built up in the way that you can check every single move that is done with your data.

Wow. And I think that's one of the remarkable things around the digital infrastructure that Estonia has built. Because here, you know, certainly in Canada, and I think in a lot of you know, North American western countries, we don't have that ability, right? It feels like it's a bit of this black hole that your your your data goes into. And certainly, if you want to request as a Canadian getting access to your data. It's paper forms. It's, you know, paper you're gonna get back takes multiple months. That idea of having a live dashboard that you can go into and in real time see your data, it really does kind of move that data privacy question, kind of flips it around, right, and essentially saying, let's put the burden back on the state to show that it's responsible using your data, and do it in a very transparent type of way.

I fully agree with what you said, and I would like to underline that if you have a paper file, you actually don't know who looked at your paper file and who looked at your data. It can even be medical data. You don't know which people took a look on this paper file. The difference with the digital one is that you can be absolutely sure that you know every single person who looked on your data. We have had cases in hospitals, for example, where there has been a patient and there has been a friend of the patient working as a doctor, maybe even the patient asked this friend to look after the data and give second advice or something like that. But this is not allowed, so the doctor who did so had absolutely good intention, but no legal grounds to do this, and the doctor lost the job because it was not allowed to look on the data, so only the doctor who is responsible, or of course, you can get a second opinion in Estonia as well, free of charge. So this the second doctor has this right, but not your friends, even not your relatives, do not if they work as officials, or if they technically might have the possibility to look at your data, they are not allowed.

I want to maybe, you know, as we kind of come to the end of our conversation, look a little bit forward and you know, we talked a bit about the history of the last few decades of Estonia's journey. I'm wondering in you know, in the years ahead, what are you looking forward to, or what do you think are kind of the next most important milestones for Estonia as it continues its digital journey?

Of course, I have to again underline cyber security, because, as a pity, also, the evil side is developing. So this is remains as the top issue to ensure that we are before the evil ones. So but, but to go to the services, as all the services already are digitalized or digital. Then the next step is to personalize the services using the data and again, making it in this way, that citizens are real winners, that they get even more services in a that are personalized, that match their needs, and that come that the services come to people in an even more smooth way, so that you don't have to apply to anything, basically. So that's the road we are looking for.

I've heard one of your former colleagues, Siim Sikkut, former CIO from Estonia, talk about this idea that the best service interaction is no service interaction at all.

Absolutely. So the best government is the government you don't notice at all?

Absolutely. And do you, you know at the beginning of our conversation, and we talked a little bit about artificial intelligence, do you think AI is going to be part of that? I mean, do you envision a future where AI essentially plays that intermediary role between government and citizens?

We adapted a new guidelines for Estonian government in spring and for AI, and that includes that we want to become the government in the world that uses most of the AI. So we see it as an enabler.

Minister, we're really happy you had a chance to come visit Canada and be able to spend some time here in Ottawa. I'm going to give the final word to you any, any kind of closing thoughts, as you know, a lot of our listening audience is coming from Canada. You know, we're thinking about how to modernize our digital government approach in this country, any kind of final lessons or advice that you would give for for our listeners here as to what they should take away from the Estonian experience and try to apply here in Canada?

If that's government side, I think you should start from the basic architecture that you have, the interoperability system like the X-Road we have in Estonia, and that is scalable to Canada. So you need, you need this first. If you are citizen, so I think it's good for your tax percentage that you support the digital developments, because then you have to pay less taxes.

That's that's always a strong selling point.

You get better services and you get better services at the same time.

I mean, that is, that is a dream, lower taxes and better services.

And, of course, I invite everybody to visit also physically, Estonia.

I had a chance to go in 2016 It was a beautiful country. I look forward to coming back sometime.

Thank you so much for your good words.

Well, and thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate having you on the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the first part of our deep dive into the Estonian digital story, and a big thanks again to Minister Pakosta, Siim, and Ville for sharing their experiences. They actually shared a lot more in their interviews than we could put into this episode with so many insights that may be of interest to you. So if you want to go even further into the Estonian digital journey and see what else they had to say, please check out our Let's Think Digital YouTube channel where we've posted the full uncut interviews with all three of them. As I mentioned, this is the first of two episodes on the Estonian digital journey. Next episode, we're talking to Andres Raieste, Senior Vice President, Public Sector at the Estonian based company Nortel. That conversation centered around the importance of trust as a key ingredient to modernized government. I think it's clear that we're in a particular moment in time right now where you see around the world decreasing levels of trust in government. Skepticism and the fear of big technology companies and fears about hacking and the theft of personal information. Andres has done a lot of work recently looking at how trust is having an impact on digital transformation efforts around the world. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast to be notified as soon as that episode drops, and that's the show for this week. We always love hearing from our listeners, so get in touch by emailing us at podcast@thinkdigital.ca visiting letsthinkdigdigital.ca or using the #letsthinkdigital on social media. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode of Let's Think Digital was produced by myself, Wayne Chu and Aislinn Bornais. Thanks so much for listening, and let's keep thinking digital.