Role model Estonia?: In the digital model country

Anyone who has to deal with authorities in Estonia practically no longer has to go to the office. The Baltic state is considered a model case for how administration can offer its services digitally. But the infrastructure is getting old.

Holger Kiik is a lecturer at the University of Tallinn and he is happy: on February 16 he is marrying his girlfriend. Of course, they filled out the application for the wedding digitally. “When I apply for marriage, I can choose who I want to marry,” says Kiik with a laugh. However, the other person would of course have to digitally countersign the whole thing at the end. The two only have to go to the office for the final signature. In the event of a divorce later, it would be the same again: Kiik takes care of all the rest of the contact with the authorities on the Internet.

Digital ID has been mandatory for more than 20 years

This has been everyday life in Estonia for years. After independence from the former Soviet Union, the country was faced with a green meadow and had to rethink the entire administration: Lean, inexpensive, digital – that was the motto. “Basically, this infrastructure is extremely important,” says Florian Marcus. He is originally from Germany and has been working as a digitization consultant in the country for years.

“We all have an electronic identity card, which is mandatory in Estonia. It’s been around since 2001.” Added to this is the data exchange that is made possible between the authorities. “On this whole basis, 99.9 percent of all government services are now online,” says the consultant. Buying a house, registering a pet, voting in elections: all this happens online.

First “signs of aging”

A question that Marcus has to answer regularly: What about data protection – if even the information about your own health is available digitally? “Not every authority, not every civil servant can access every data record,” he explains. “The tax office has no access to my medical data.”

Very important: “In my portal I can see when which authority accesses which of my data records.” In Estonia, for example, there have been cases in the past in which doctors or police officers violated this rule and lost their licenses and jobs as a result.

The first digital services appeared in 1999; the systems are getting old. Updates are missing in some places – the state should invest more here, say Marcus and other digitization experts in Estonia.

World class when it comes to cyber security

Otherwise, the small Baltic country not only shines with a digital administration, but also with enormous competence in matters of cyber security: According to a study, the country is the third best in the world in this area. It is also home to NATO’s Cyber ​​Security Center.

Estonia is therefore not protected from attacks, and since the outbreak of the Russian war against Ukraine they have increased sharply – so far without any significant effects, according to the responsible authority.

“German bureaucracy inefficient”

Digitization expert Marcus worked for the Estonian government for a while and, among other things, introduced German delegations to the principle of the “digital state”. When he asks Germans why they think digitization is important, they often replied – usually after a ten-second delay: “Digitization is the future.”

For Marcus, this answer meant that there was still no excessive suffering in Germany, where the government said, “This annoys us and we have to change that”. “The state has too much money for it to do any harm, for it to realize how inefficient and ineffective the German bureaucracy is,” concludes Marcus from this attitude.

Digitization has limits

For the newly engaged and soon to be married Holger Kiik, however, there are also limits to digitization. Having to go to an office for one of the most beautiful days in life – the wedding – doesn’t bother him: “If the final signature were also digital, then you would have a strange feeling just having clicked on the Internet. That would be unusual.”