Trust is everything. It’s clear we’re in a moment in time where people do not trust their governments. There is skepticism about the impact of big technology companies, concerns about new technologies like artificial intelligence, and fear about the future, including the future of our democratic institutions themselves. 

So we should be concerned about how complex, opaque, and often infuriating bureaucratic systems can further challenge citizens’ faith in government and erode trust in those who are there to serve the public. Whether it is navigating complex tax filing rules, trying to access health care supports, or something a simple as getting a passport renewed, delays and failed service delivery experiences raise doubt in the minds of citizens as to government's ability to accomplish even basic tasks.

So how can we rebuild this trust?

On today's episode, the second of of our two-part deep dive into the Estonian digital modernization journey, we're talking to Andres Raieste, Senior Vice President of Public Sector (Global) at the Estonian-based digital transformation firm Nortal. Andres has over 15 years of experience in digital modernization and began his career in Estonia as a digital government expert. Since then he has been responsible for many high-impact, large-scale government transformation programs and reforms globally, as well as producing thought leadership and developing practices to help governments deliver better digital services to its citizens.

Nortal recently released a report on trust, called "Formula for creating trust in digital government" which he talked about on stage at the FWD50 conference in Ottawa last month. So when we met up during his visit to Canada, we talked about why trust is important and how digital services can best create trust in society through small incremental improvements in services rather than focusing on flashy innovation. We even got into a discussion on the role of emerging technologies like blockchain and AI and how to get past the hype and focus on results.

Watch on YouTube

https://youtu.be/FzbyuwzRcrI?si=on3TMZHtfq8Wj00E

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and the Importance of Trust in Government

01:27 Rebuilding Trust: The Estonian Digital Transformation

03:20 Interview with Andres Raieste

07:46 The Role of Trust in Digital Government

15:24 Tax Collection and Trust in Estonia

23:18 Transparency and Data Ownership in Estonia

27:45 Digital Public Infrastructure

36:01 Blockchain and Cybersecurity in Estonia

43:24 Personal Government

48:59 Reducing Complexity in Government Services

53:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Ryan 0:05

I'm Ryan Androssoff, welcome to Let's Think Digital. If I've learned one thing in my time working in and with governments, it's that trust is everything. If you look at what's happening around the world, it's clear that we're in a moment in time where people don't trust their governments. There's skepticism about the impact of big technology companies, concerns about new technologies like artificial intelligence and fear about the future, including the future of our democratic institutions themselves. In my experience, I've seen time and time again how complex, opaque and often infuriating bureaucratic systems can challenge citizen's faith in government and erode trust in those who are there to serve the public, whether it's navigating complex tax filing rules, trying to access health care supports or something as simple as getting a passport renewed. Delays and failed service delivery experiences continue to erode trust in government, and frankly, raise doubt in the mind of citizens as to government's ability to accomplish even basic tasks. We've even seen in countries around the world where these service failures become political scandals and can bring down governments. So how can we rebuild trust? To answer this question, we're going to go back to the Estonian story in part two of our deep dive into the Estonian digital transformation journey, and we're talking to Andres Raieste, a Senior Vice President at the Estonian based digital transformation firm Nortel, which has played a big role over the years in developing Estonia's world leading digital government services and infrastructure. We talked about why trust is important, how digital services can create trust in society through small, incremental improvements, rather than focusing on flashy innovation. Andres shared the perhaps surprising fact that the Estonian tax collector is actually one of the most trusted institutions in the country, and why that was such an important sign of success in their digital government efforts. We even got into a discussion on the role of emerging technologies like blockchain and AI, and if they should be used in government. It was a really insightful conversation, and made me think about how the topics we discuss on this podcast are so important, not just for creating better services for people, but the impact that they can have in the broader context of the geopolitical tensions we're seeing in countries around the world. But before I turn it over to Andres, if you're watching today's episode on YouTube, I'd love it if you could take a moment to hit the subscribe button. We're trying to reach as many people as we can to build this movement of people who are interested in how we can modernize government, and the more subscribers on our channel, the more likely that our conversations get in front of people who need to see them. Everyone here at Let's Think Digital would be so grateful for the help in spreading the word, and now our conversation with Andres. So we're back live at Forward50, or at least live for us now, here on the conference floor, continuing our series of interesting conversations about the world digital government, and really happy to have Andres with us, who's joining us from the company Nortel, based in Estonia, but doing work around the world, and I know you're here to talk a little bit about trust in government, which we'll get to in a little bit. But thank you. And welcome to Ottawa.

Andres Raieste 3:47

Thank you.

Ryan 3:49

Now I wanted, you've got an interesting, I think, history on this. I mean, you have been working in the private sector for the last number of years, in and around digital government, but I know you started your career inside the Estonian government. One, wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your personal career path and kind of what led you to getting involved in this, this space that we call digital government.

Andres Raieste 4:11

Well, I started as an engineer, so I was doing quite a bit of coding. That was very long time, over 20 years ago or maybe even something around that and and then somehow the journey led me to Estonian government. So in I started my career, I believe in Ministry of Justice, in their digitalization department that later on became an entire organization. And this was like back then, was like this, one of the earliest organizations that was driving large scale government digital transformation programs, and it was really building up the digital government from the institution and the legislative point of view. So working with those programs like back then, back then, we didn't realize that that shapes the entire future of the Estonian government overall, or the journey so that, you know, it built up some foundational registries, the entire legislative system all around it, that manifestation of the once only principle, how it really works, and that entire system. So, so back then, all of us, like, really, from the technical point of view and everybody else. These were these core practices that were being developed back then without even realizing it, only looking back in hindsight, can we say okay that what we did back then, that this actually meant the following. So there was a, it was very exciting times, honestly. So a lot what happened back then was also purely experimental. And so if anybody asked us back then, they say, did you have extremely good idea back then, what are being rolled out? Absolutely not. So a lot of things, we can look back and say that we had also incredible luck that somehow lot of smart people were able to come together and make certain decisions which turned out really good decisions. S o I was, I've seen the government for for many, many years, and then then wanted to do similar things in the rest of the world. This, this is what led me to Nortel later on and understood that there's a lot technology is changing how we live in our societies, and there's a lot of good practices all around the world. There's incredible innovation that has been done in New Zealand, in Chile, in Singapore, in Finland, in Denmark, in Estonia, and elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere. And we need to create a platform where we can bring all of this competence and understanding together and then, like, accelerate it somehow. And this is, this is what, why I joined Nortel, and like, overall, what we're trying to or desiring to achieve.

Ryan 7:01

Yeah, no, it's, it's really interesting. And I think, you know, having that, that global reach, as you said, to be able to bring some of those practices together is really important. And it's, you know, it's difficult, I think, for people who are in government on the day to day, you know, trying to manage their jobs, trying to deal with kind of, you know, putting out fires that are popping up, to be able to take the time to understand what some of those best practices or examples are that are coming out in other parts of the world. And you know, events like this at Forward50 are useful for that, but having organizations that are trying to be able to bring that perspective together certainly is kind of a useful gap that I think is missing in some, some places, certainly within that digital government ecosystem.

Andres Raieste 7:44

Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan 7:45

Yeah. And so you know, you're, you're here speaking about trust, your your talk, you're giving at Forward50 is about trust in government, the importance of that. And I think it's an interesting topic, right? Because we're at a, we're at a point where globally, we've got declining levels of trust, I mean, almost across the world, with probably a few exceptions around that. You know, at the same time, we also have a lack of trust in technology, right? I think we're seeing a lot of debates around big technology companies and the role that they play as well. And so, you know, I mean, maybe to start with, curious, if you kind of give us a bit of a sense of how you think trust impacts digital government, and what the relationship between the two of them are?

Andres Raieste 8:30

I would maybe put it first from that angle that trust is one of those outcomes that overall would even, let's say, if we talk about digitalization, trust is one of those outcomes that we desire to create overall. Like this answers the question, why are we doing this, when democracy still rely on trust and and there is also this interesting that the research clearly shows that trust and effectiveness are very tightly correlated. So practically speaking, the let's say, instruments that increase trust, they also tend to increase effectiveness and the other way around. So there is a very clear business case for both of them, right? Why to do this, right? So other than that, I mean, as I said, in democracies, what are the other options? So a lot of the governments struggle with keeping, keeping the society cohesive. So solution to that is to, like, create trust for the institutions, create trust between the different social groups. And practically speak, there's not too many ways how to do it, not too many ways how to do it so.

Ryan 9:50

Well, and it's, and so it also strikes me that there's a little bit of what we sometimes call it, the chicken and egg paradox around trust, right? Because you have to have a level of trust to be able to invest in transformation of the state. But I think, as you're rightly pointing out, unless you've got that trust, it's tough to actually make real progress on that. And I guess my question is, where do you start, right? Like, how do you kind of break that, you know, what can be a vicious circle and turn it into a virtuous circle?

Yeah. Small things. So the funniest thing is that trust is incredibly researched area. The like, I really like that. How our go researcher on trust, how is putting this is that there is very little fields of trust that hasn't been researched. It's very tricky to find it. And one thing that constantly comes out is that what creates trust is the small, continuous improvements in the public services, small ones, not big ones, small ones, because that really drives back to the cognitive bias that we know as the negativity bias that we remember negative things so much more strongly than the positive events. Practically all the institutions that are capable of doing smaller small things enjoy significantly higher public approval, right? So there is a bunch of these type of small tips that are practically speaking, regularly within all the authority of the public services to actually implement those instruments in their organizations and inter policies. And the funny part is that, as well, that I mean trust what like, what is our experience is that it's really common sense if you really think about it, we can say that it's a bunch of research, but yeah, it's common sense.

Yeah, no, well, and I think that logically makes a lot of sense that those small, incremental improvements that people can feel in their daily lives, you know, I mean, does have that ability to kind of shift how they're thinking about some of these issues. So I wonder, like thinking back to those early days of when you were in government and kind of, you know, what I might call the early days of Estonia's digital journey, was trust ever kind of viewed as an explicit goal of the digitization efforts, or was it just a natural outcome?

Back then, honest, I don't think that that there was too much thinking around it, but there were, there were several things that worked out really well in terms of, I think that one thing that I think that the Estonian government was able to nail rather early was the way how to talk about digitalization in the society. Communication strategy and citizen don't really care about the how part. They don't care about what power specifically, which technological marvel is now powering public services. They care about that it looks great, that it's solves their problems, is easy to utilize, doesn't cost them money, doesn't waste their time these sort of things. And there are even different surveys that are showcasing that, like, you know what drives the trust the most like OECD trust, service, very, very known one, and satisfaction with the service experience is by far the largest outlier. What creates trust? What is the smallest one? Innovative ideas.

Interesting.

Yes, it's super interesting, yeah. And if you have somebody preaching around that utilized this next technological marvel to average voter that, in reality, doesn't increase trust. What matters is that that person gets their problem solved. So they don't care how. But it's so so focusing on that. So there is, like, several showcases back from the early Estonia, they said, how say, how are we capable of creating trust for the society, for like, significantly larger programs and how to communicate? So don't say that this 100 million euro program is now, I don't know, collecting your data records and creating some sort of large scale program for a private sector. Now, let's talk about that. Okay, that that's a that is going to great free patient movement. It for the for the patients, will drive down the cost of health care. Is going to save lives. These are the outcomes. So, the question is always okay, we need to be capable of understanding the impact of what we're doing. There needs to be a business case for the society. And it's always there. The question is that, are we able to find it? Are we able and you know, if and that also creates the goals for the program itself. How do we prioritize what is valuable? You need to understand the socio economic impact. Only then we're capable of, let's say, communicating it the right way to the you know, there is wisdom in the crowds. If they don't understand it, then it's very valuable question that, are we doing the right thing

Well, and then also, you know, as you were saying, the communication around this, right, like how we talk about this, and the language we use. So as part of this conference, you've got a new white paper about trust in government that's going to be released soon. And, you know, I had a chance to take a look at some of the examples in there, and you had a really interesting one around tax collection, right? And I think that's always, you know, it's been a digital service that's pointed to in Estonia, and this kind of notion of how it got shifted from saying, you know, tax collection is about trying to find the bad guys, and flipped it to say, actually, it's about, how do we empower citizens, right? And I thought that's a very interesting way to kind of frame it and think about it. I mean, just kind of curious for you to talk about that a little bit more. And you know, if there's other examples like that where kind of the framing of services has moved from being punitive to being empowering?

Yeah, I love that example, because it's so paradoxical, in a way, that one of the, the most trusted government authority in Estonia, if I remember, is Rescue Board by heart. But that's kind of logical, because they save your life, right? Yeah, with the tax ordering session, they take your money. So how is it possible that in Estonia people trust that taxal authority more than anything it's like, fourth, if I remember correctly, in the overall ranking. And this is the question that, what is the what are the outcomes, what that organization is trying to achieve? So it creates a equitable business environment where everybody are having equal rights. So if they're capable of communicating and actually succeeding in those outcomes, practically speaking, everybody starts to understand that, okay, the taxation is a necessary evil of sort, but if that organization is assuring that all of that happens equitably for everyone that it elevates rates trust. Now comes the other aspects of it, that how can we empower further so let's say that the one of the indicators for the tax authorities always is the tax cap. The tax cap is so the strategies for tax organizations typically are the like a calculation between intrusion and collection. So you audit more, you lose on trust. So that's the calculation, mostly. And I used to question that at a certain point the tax cap is low enough that you will need to invest further into audit or intrusion, but that starts to affect the formula. So there are way better ways how to actually start increasing the compliance, utilizing methods like targeted transparency, basically all the different methodologies to focus on voluntary compliance that you would want to pay your taxes, and that also goes completely back to those very basic schemes that, okay, that let's make it simple. Let's make it understandable. Let's make you understand your impact as a citizen. So clever service design concepts that modify your behavior as a citizen. So these are those things that we care more about our country, we showcase the impact. Can even, why not add gamification to it? These sort of concepts. And these are moving the needle actually, you can see clearly, these are moving to voluntary compliance, which is voluntary compliance is possible only in a high trust environment.

Yeah. Well, and I think anybody who's listened to this podcast before may have heard me talk about, you know, one of the, one of the classic examples from Estonia on taxes is just the fact that you have automatic filing, right? You talk about the service improvement. This is something we've struggled with actually making happen here in Canada. But this idea that, you know, for most people who have simple taxes, you know, you essentially, my understanding is you get essentially a text message at the end of the year and it says, Hey, here's what we think it is. And if you agree, you just print Yes, and you're done.

Yeah. So yeah, it's really good example of how simplicity like, what is the desired outcome in order to try and trust but also that also brings to a very important point that, how do you go towards it, from the low trust environment towards creating more trust? So there are different strategies, like nudging, for example, that okay, that let's make two services. One service is a service where you need to enter the data yourself, consumes your time. And then there is a pattern there that, okay, that trust me and I will pre fill it for you. And with that you need to consent, or there is a mechanism around it that, okay, that and that, if you trust the system, and the system is transparent enough, then, practically speaking everybody wants to utilize the service that actually saves their time. This, best example of this is, in my opinion, like Facebook, that you like people give their a lot of their personal data to Facebook or social media or so forth. Why do they do it? Why do why do they not want to give it to the public service? Why do I give it to, like completely somebody else? It's because it provides value for them, emotional value, and that drives over everything else, this user satisfaction.

Yeah, and I think a degree of maybe put a different way, people are willing to some degree, to trade privacy for convenience, sometimes, although with government, it tends to be held to a higher bar, right? And that trust gap can be a little bit higher. I'm also wondering on the internal side, so I don't know if you'd be able to speak to this, but when Estonia was making some of these changes, like, for example, putting in automatic tax filing, you know, sometimes we also get resistance inside government, because people and structures and systems are used to doing things a different way. And I'm wondering, I mean, did you have to convince the bureaucracy within Estonia to change, or was this a very natural kind of process where there was a lot of consensus that we had to actually make these reforms?

It's step by step. So practically, also the change in Estonia or other countries. I believe so as well, that, at least that I know of these changes are small, gradual, and, you know, I believe it that it's impossible to roll out the digital government off the box. It's not possible. It's that societal change, what we're talking here about. It's not technological change, societal change. And these are very small improvements that are happening all across the entire government. And you know, if the ball gets rolling, simply, I believe that there are some organizations that are more important than others. Why I like the example of tax authorities because you make tax authority trust worthy, or let's say, trusted by the people on a very high level. I don't think that then there is anything else that you cannot do. Because the bar there is the highest in my opinion.

Yeah, because there is that tension, or maybe it's a perceived tension between, on the one hand, governments need to get access to people's data to be able to give them good, integrated services. You know, citizens tend to worry about privacy and making sure government only collects the bare minimum. And so, you know, it really does sound like it's kind of having this baseline level of trust is just this necessary ingredient to be able to build any kind of integrated service.

I'm not sure that, um...

Yeah, please.

A lot of people think somehow that in Estonia we have some sort of concept such as a baseline Estonian trust. Absolutely not. We're just as paranoid as everybody else people are, people like, I assure you, im just as paranoid as you are, and everybody else, and we have simply focused on different strategies that how to resolve our basic instinct not to trust. So one I would say that underlying pillar concept of our digital government is the concept that as a citizen, I own my data. It manifests everywhere. And what it means is that, by the way, in Europe, we have something called GDPR, so general data protection regulation, and on Europe, it's pretty tough. And it was funny that when this regulation came, then there were like, countries that say that, you know, basically hands up that, okay, no, digitalization is over. We're not going to do anything. And then there were different countries who said, Wow, that's great. Now we can do everything. So it's completely different way how do we look at it. We look at this that, yes, data belongs to the citizen. We need to regulate. How do we utilize that data? We need to become transparent and show it. And by the way, there is no there is no transparency on if you're also not capable of proving, so you can't simply say, trust us. You need to be capable of proving, how to do it, transparency. So in Estonia, we have a system where, basically it's if somebody misutilizes my data, I can kind of be, let's say, assured, in a way that first of all, I will, I will find out. If I don't, somebody else will find out. So there is, like, a wider way how to protect the cities and rights, rights in that sense, so that.

And as we heard about here at the conference. You know, as some some listeners may not be aware, in Estonia, as a citizen like you, essentially can sign into a dashboard and be able to see the information and data that government has about you, and be able to see who's looked at that data, you know, be able to kind of look back on the other side of Looking Glass, so to speak. Whereas in Canada, it's a very manual process, takes a long time, and a lot of it still is tied up in paper files that are not very transparent , ultimately.

Yeah, yeah. So the important aspect there is as well that, yes, we have a central system where, basically as a citizen you can see who has been utilizing your data, why and how. So this is built into the digital public infrastructure on top of it, and you know, it's a cohesive system but, but actually, that can also be done into in any single service, any single service. Let's say that you don't have that system right now. That doesn't mean that you should now spend the next, who knows how many years figuring out that central system. No, absolutely not. You can start small, and actually, any service can be made transparent. There's any sort of authority that is doing something with your data and then offer extra respect. Inside of that service, you can already tell how we're utilizing making [programs] transparent and so forth. So, so everything can be scaled down, everything can be scaled up. That's the beauty of it. It's policy. That's principle.

Well, and so then talking about central services, I want to talk about X-Road for a minute, because, you know, X-Road is kind of the backbone of Estonia's digital systems. It's kind of data infrastructure. We've talked about X-Road or mentioned it a little bit on the podcast before, but I'd be curious to get your kind of explanation of like, what is it actually and how? How does the X-Road model differ from how, say, a government in Canada might traditionally set up its services or share them?

Best explanation for what X-Road is, is that take off the X, it's the road.

It's a road.

Yeah, so it just connects. I mean, the entire point of this is that, like, historically, we're used to looking at the government as a bunch of different authorities, and that's the cities, and you're thinking, okay, that's the tax authority, that's the pannel, some sort of social benefits organization, or unemployment unemployment organization, like different organizations, but actually, it's just the government, right? It shouldn't be your US citizen. Shouldn't be your problem how the government works. So what we need to do for that, we need to tie the government into a cohesive bowl. How do you do it? You require something that is capable of creating data exchange or like information highways between the different government systems, the registries and so forth. There's not many different ways how to do it. So you need to create some sort of a highway between them, and also assure that it's super secure. But further is that if you really, let's say, think about it. If that's this is also like, I love this term, this digital public infrastructure, because roads are also public infrastructure. And what it means public is that I'm not sure that you would like it to be private. So I wouldn't be sure that, for example, if a digital public infrastructure is somebody constantly takes a transaction price off it. I'm not sure, so that these are the difficult policy questions that when somebody starts to implement their digital public infrastructure, part of it also a data exchange system like X-Road or something else that we make the right decisions and understand that what it truly is, because it's a very different question, whether your roads to whom do the billing belong? Do they belong to the cities and or do they belong to somebody else? It's very, very crucial decision point to make.

And we've, you know, we have privatized whole roads in some places here in Canada, certainly in Ontario, and they are controversial for exactly that reason. And so, you know, just going back to X-Road for a second. So it is like, on a technical level, it's essentially a data protocol, right, that allows different government, the private sector, others, to be able to interoperate, share data with each other.

Yes, it's data exchange system that securely allows to exchange data.

And did it become in, when it was being released, was it mandatory? Like, was there a requirement for the government to say you have to use this, or was was adoption of it voluntary?

I think in the beginning it was voluntary. So at a certain point in time when it was being rolled out, of course, it was like done gradually. There were lots of point to point integration between different authorities. So if you roll out something like this, you cannot just force everybody from day, like from tomorrow, everybody do it. You need to start gradually doing it. Also, we did it the same way the gradual adoption and, like, constantly updating the regulation, like bit by bit by bit. And then, like, later on, that became, like the very quickly back then. But, you know, in. In some years, it being the de facto way of for the government to operate, and that started to develop further. And later on, what you got was like a manifestation of the, almost of the once only principle, I mean that the X-Road is one thing is the technical system. But I would say what is even more important is that what is the fundamental policy or regulative system underneath that drives all of this, or what enables all of this so, so this is like regulated in Estonia, in a way that you have different registries which basically regulate that who owns, like what the authority is allowed to own, what to collect, what data and store it, what are the privileges and considerations related to specific data so and this is what basically establishes, like, what can be done with your data, who can use it. And you know, cohesively that creates this once only principle that okay, that we have, for example, an address registry, that means that no single authority is allowed to ask for me where I live. They need to get it from that system.

Yes.

Don't ask me that.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And from a citizen perspective, if I can extend the metaphor of the car for a second or the road you know, their car to get on, that is their digital identity, right? And, and if I understand, right, you know, with Estonian citizens, you have a physical digital ID card with a chip as well as an electronic, essentially digital ID that kind of pairs those two up to prove that you are who you are.

Yes, I mean, it's, I mean, I think almost everybody uses their mobile phone now, so it's a PKI based system. I mean, it originates, actually from the banks. So the history of Estonian digital identity system is that from a very pragmatic origins, there was a like several banks and different organizations think, you look we're all trying to solve the same problem that all of us somehow, let's say, want to provide online services, banking services to its citizen, and it needs to be super trustworthy. So there's like, pin calculators, there's like, there was, like, very long password cards, and none of those were good enough, so required some sort of system that is like, first of all, it's like, has a better user experience than in some sort of pin calculator. But the second part was that, okay, that independently doing that system for every different financial organization or some other service organization, quite expensive. So for them, that was very reasonable. Start collaborating that. Look, let's create a single system where we all benefit, we solve the same problem, and let's utilize the best possible, secure system, possible method. And on that regard, practically speaking, there are not many different ways how to do it. So you need cryptography, you need like and there's not, there's not very different ways how to utilize that. So we utilize PKI solution. So I wouldn't know what would be a better alternative. So and and later on, simply the different carriers became different. So more, let's say it started as this plastic card, then it went into a SIM card in your phone. Now it's an application, so like this way how to provide it to the cities has changed.

And has evolved with technology.

But originally the let's say it happened because there was a need for it. It's just there was a business case for it, and then government adopted it as well, and that basically created a system that's trusted through the entire society.

Very interesting, I didn't realize that it started with the banks and then went to government. So that's quite interesting.

Yeah, there was, like, originally, I mean, it was actually the banks and telecommunication companies, I think so as well that, so long time ago, that were like, putting into food stores society card readers in like, huge boxes. Just take it. Just take it and this, and then this, later on, this ID card. This is now the for many, many, many stores. This is a retailer loyalty card,. So I don't know, I like cheese, and I buy cheese, and the loyalty card is that I put in my ID card. And stupid example. But my point is that it's a regular stores. It's that as a wel.

Exactly Yeah. And that's, I think that is different, certainly, than how it is here, where, even where we do have government credentials, certainly the private sector doesn't tend to leverage them in the same way. So for a lot of people, you know, you're not usually dealing with government every day, but you're probably dealing with your local supermarket or your local pharmacy, you know, or the economy on a regular basis, and because they're divided. I mean, it sounds like an Estonian society that becomes just critical to your daily life and becomes much more accepted as part of how you live as a result of that.

Yeah. So the yeah, exactly so kind of everything that has this bowl of society component of it tends to work better, that's our experience. That just government doing something, then it's a question of sustainability a little bit, and is it like what is driving the competition and so forth, just private sector doing something, then something else gets left behind. Somehow, something that works. Solutions that work out, both for the public and the private sector, tend to be most reliable somehow.

And more sustainable.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so you were saying there's not a lot of ways to do things in terms of, you know, these kind of technical solutions to some of these, these core kind of public digital infrastructure pieces. I did want to bring up, though we were talking about this earlier off camera, is, is blockchain, which becomes, you know, the kind of one of these, what I might call shiny object technologies, that gets put out there. And, you know, maybe has some use cases in some in some instances. But my understanding is blockchain is essentially not used as part of X-Road, and it's not used very widely in Estonia,

Yeah, kind of, I mean, let me explain this. So, blockchain, we need to understand very clearly what we're talking about, and this tends to become sometimes difficult, and also what blockchain kind of represents. Blockchain represents a situation where we don't trust each other, and then we require a system how we can collaborate, where we don't trust each other. Now, kind of what is the problem with that is that actually we want to create a situation where we trust each other, so we want to end up with an outcome where we don't need blockchain. So focusing on something like that is like an antithesis of what we're trying to achieve, really. So that creates a problem.

So it's almost like, like blockchain exists because you've got a societal failure of some sort.

Exactly.

It's better to fix the society than papered it over with technology.

Yeah, let's fix the society. So, and, but, but there are cases where it is very useful. So for example, and you know, even before like blockchain became a thing, so in, I know, you probably know, in 2007 there was this event in Estonia that became known as a world first, like a massive national scale cyber attack on Estonia by Russia. And it was a very big thing back then that, you know, this large cyber attack that was like, you know, declaration of war in cyberspace. And many people don't realize that it never stopped. It's still active. There is no peace anymore in cyberspace. It's only constant warfare, at least for some countries. And, and back then the Estonian government, they realized that this is now the normal thing, and we need to be building our digital government to be capable of with like handling like constant cyber warfare. And, and we also need to be, let's say, understanding how to actually, if that's the premise that you are constantly in a war, how to build up a system that is capable of providing normal services where you don't have any, you know, regular sort of down times and like, breaking and tampering of information so different mechanisms. But one of those mechanisms was that, if the, let's say, on those realization that if your opponent is highly motivated, highly financed, there will be eventuality where they will find a way through at one point. And in those situations, what that might leak? Sensitive information might leak. Sensitive information might be deleted. And sensitive information might be tampered with. Those latter two might even be more dangerous than the first one.

Right. And in part, because it can happen silently for a while, you might not know that your data has been tampered with.

Yeah, exactly. And there are actually ways how to protect yourselves against data tampering. So we understood that we need to protect our registries, both from the internal and external attacks. We need to assure that, for example, our like most sensitive government registries, we can assure that nobody has ever, both internally and externally, has never tampered some data in there. So how do you do that? So there's actually very simple ways how to do that, that technically speaking, you have some database records and you crypto crack, like through crypto, you link those database records together, where every next record in the registry depends on the previous one, right? And if the first registry, the first, very first hack is a public information, for example, published even in a newspaper or somewhere, it doesn't really matter, but something, then everything, what comes after it can be verified back to the original source. So much later, this became known as blockchain, much later, but the same really simple principle, this was actually something that was driving the Estonian government security already, much earlier, and simply blockchain added, like distributed ledger to it, where would say you don't need to publish something in New York Times or somewhere, so it's a so it's a very pragmatic use case for that, where there is a extremely specific use case for it. But what I very strongly believe is that technology shouldn't find an owner. Owner should find, like, you know, you shouldn't, technology shouldn't find the problem to solve, exactly.

So, well, as they sometimes say, yeah, some of these new technologies are solutions in search of a problem.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, obviously, we're seeing also a lot of that with AI currently, which, in my opinion, also, I mean, it's clear this is transformative. What is happening with humankind at this point? I mean, we're becoming like transhuman in that sense, it's transformative. But there's also a lot of looking for us.

A lot of hype, right? You know, these new technologies have a lot of hype.

Crazy amount of hype and, but still, we need to understand that what works where, not the other way around. Same principles apply.

Yeah, and, and again. You know, I imagine in Estonia's case, because you have this very real external threat. You know, this focus on, how do you make sure that you're resilient? How do you make sure that you can withstand that threat? Probably helps to focus efforts a little bit, I would imagine, on finding very practical, tangible use cases for technology, rather than just as we were talking about earlier innovation for the sake of innovation.

I would say that it's a paradox, but I would say what drives innovation is not being very rich. If you need to do things cheaply, you do things pragmatically. And turns out pragmatic solutions are innovative.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, and I mean, being very honest, you know, I think in Canada, we're likely going to be going through a period of budget cutbacks over the next few years. You know, there's a lot of debate around, should we be kind of shrinking the size of government? And I do, to your point, sometimes think those constraints might be the engine for a new wave of innovation.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

So speaking of a new wave, and kind of the last thing I wanted to really ask you about, we talk a lot about digital government, I have this slide that I often use, which I kind of look at the history of technology and government. And I kind of view there being like three phases. There was, like the early e-government, when governments are putting information online for the first time, then you had government 2.0 as they were calling it was really about social media, and how do we communicate differently things like open data and open information initiatives. Then, in the last decade, we talked a lot about digital government, right? Which is this kind of idea of, how do you modernize the state by taking advantage of some of these new technologies, but your company has put out a couple of papers and kind of coined this new term of personal government as kind of a next iteration of where digital government's evolving to. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that a bit. I think this idea of personal government is a really interesting one.

I would start maybe untangling it from, again, from the service experience, or the outcomes point of view. But also, when we created in Estonia, the very first digital services, honestly, the service experience was pretty horrible. So I mean, it's, it's typically look like this, that you have some sort of an e-service where you could upload a document, and and then you had to go to a garment office or call a help desk or something like that. Or maybe not, maybe they sent you back some human clerk on the on the other side and did their magic, and then you've got some PDF document. And the problem is that, I mean, practically speaking, the these services do not really save too much time. It makes information processing easier and so forth, but the real cost saving boost for the cities and for the economy and for the government as well, slightly, but not really too much and the then, like sometime later, it was understood that look, the only way how to actually start creating more valuable outcomes is that we need to start understanding what is it? What is that data that actually that we're communicating over? So let's get rid of documents. Let's change documents into data, something that we are capable of completely rethinking the services from the point of view of the consumer, the taxpayer, the citizen, whomever. So instead of sending an application, can we, for example, completely turn the process upside down? That, for example, that I don't know, social benefit, that's the story is probably told to death. But mother's benefit, that typical, typical, like in most countries, there is some sort of child birth benefit, and typical example that mother would need to file an application the child was born. Then, you know, some processing at the back office probably needs to provide some additional documents, and then babam, finally, check is posted in a box, terrible or mother, money arrives on a bank account. But all of that is actually stupid, because the fact that child was born is registered in a hospital, right? Most likely the mother's bank account number is also known by that point. Why not just send the money? Proactively. So that requires quite a bit of mature digital public infrastructure underneath that is capable of creating that type of a data exchange between the different authorities, organizations involved, hospitals so forth, standardization work on the legal system, that you know that you can actually connect those, this data together in a legal way, and so forth, so and you have the concept of proactive service. That is basically transforming worldwide, the concept of how to provide more efficient social benefits to everyone. So that is the manifestation, in my head of digital government, that away from the application era, welcome data driven organizations that are capable of offering significantly more effective public services to a citizen. So and then, okay, so what next? So this what next part we have been figuring out all of us. I mean, all of us have been figuring out that also lots of different organizations throughout the world. I mean, figuring out that, okay, what what next? What are the next big challenges to solve? So we have explored, and we're still constantly researching and exploring what that next is. We have a couple of ideas. So in personal government, we simply, we try to research and package some of our findings into some sort of cohesive vote, which I would say, probably in a year or two, we should update. But, and this is also something that, you know, I believe, that, you know, everybody should be very vocal about where is this going. But what I do believe, a couple of things, what are the biggest things? What are driving it, or the problems that we're trying to solve? First of all, complexity is constantly rising everywhere. One of the biggest problem that digital governments not really solve that well is that the complexity of the public authorities, this is becoming incomprehendable to people, right? And it's insane that even that you know in constitutional rights in many countries, you have something that says that, as a citizen, it's your right to know the legislation, but it nowhere says that I should have an army of lawyers who explain it to me. That's crazy. So we need to be capable of making like if we ask from, from from our cities, and that they need to, let's say, be capable of, of existing in the society and being compliant with the law and so forth. Then I would say it's fair to make the government also comprehendible then to the citizen. So I think that the problem that we need to solve. Is to reduce the complexity. Yeah, that and, and I think it's, it's unrealistic to start like some sort of huge deregulation programs. It's just unrealistic. Might might happen some sort of fantasy world. But there are technological options how to actually make it more easier. So, so creating service interfaces that underneath are actually capable of hiding that complexity away, so that it exists there. The bureaucracy there might still be there, but the service experience for the citizen is so great. One of those examples, for example, is the service in Estonia old, getting married. So typically, you will have a one service that you file an application for marriage. Then you might have a service that, for example, somebody changes the name, needs a new document. So, so all in all, long story short, you need to communicate with like five or six different government authorities, which is stupid. Why not just have a service called get married? All the steps are in there. That service itself communicates with all the different authorities. You still can have those institutions underneath and so forth, but you're capable of creating a super simple and realistic service interface for the citizen that solves their problem. Every country in the world can do that. So this is one of those concepts. So there is a lot of those more, for example, are we capable of, can we actually create a better integration between the public sector and private sector that, for example, I have a public sector service, and the private sector can add on top of it their value add services, you know, creating, like a government as a platform. And so there's a lot of those different concepts that we have tried to, like package together, but the outcome should be that we're capable of reducing the complexity, making government feel as one singular entity that the citizen speaks to and through it we're capable of, like, creating better social cohesion and trust and added value.

Very interesting. And I think that that notion of reducing complexity, even though, as you say, we're always going to have, I think, some degree of complexity on the back end, but how do you as a citizen have a much simpler, less complex experience? It's a big ambition, but but is an important one, and, and I tend to agree with you that doing that, the big, you know, deregulation exercise, almost never tends to work.

Exactly, exactly.

Because you don't know where to start. It's too big. It's too big to understand.

Yeah, so a lot of people about are saying they're gonna we need to radically change to society. But yeah, let's be honest, actually, what we need are small, incremental improvements. Yes, these are the things that we need, because these are realistic to actually get.

And they build up momentum over time, exactly.

And trust.

And trust, yeah.

Yeah.

Going back again to trust, I think, I think it is a really important consideration. You know, we've our theme on the podcast this season is really about, you know, how do we get ourselves moving? I think there's this sense that we feel a little bit stuck in the mud here in Canada. And I think what's really come out from this conversation is just this notion that trust is one of those really essential ingredients that I think, to be honest with you, we don't talk about enough. We don't, we don't kind of quantify it, but, but it's it is so essential to have that as a baseline if you're going to be able to move forward on that. So just to say, I really appreciate you taking the time talking with us. I think this has been a really helpful conversation on that and and so glad you could be here with us in person in Ottawa to share some of the great work that you've been doing.

Absolutely thank you for asking, inviting me, and hopefully I'll be back.

Look forward to it, thank you.

Thank you.

I really take to heart the reminder that even though challenges that we face in digital modernization can seem so huge and complex, it's actually the small, incremental improvements in digital public infrastructure that will ultimately create trust in citizens and help empower efforts to improve public services. And in today's world, building trust and rebuilding trust is just so important. Thanks to Andres for speaking to me today and everyone from Estonia who took the time to talk with us about their journey over the past couple of episodes. If you haven't yet, be sure to check out our previous episode where we talk about the evolution of digital government in Estonia. And that's the show for this week. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe, and if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, please be sure to leave us a five star rating and review. We always love hearing from our listeners, so get in touch by emailing us at podcast@thinkdigital.ca visiting our website, letsthinkdigitital.ca or using the #letsthinkdigital on social media. You can find me on all the usual social media places, including now my personal account on Blue Sky and our Let's Think Digital podcast account on Tiktok. 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.