Digital citizen support - dream or reality?
It doesn't happen often, but yesterday it happened to me in Estonia - and no one is more surprised than me. I felt the way Goliath must have felt when he met David and fell... for David's stone. The stone in my case was Estonia's national digital platform X-Road: a portal that contains everything a citizen might need to get in touch with from a societal perspective - doctors, health care, tests, taxes, car registration etc etc. How I fell!
Because there has obviously been a lot of thought put into this. Estonia started with a citizen-centric approach, and built a digital citizen support system with that in mind. The starting point was to make it as simple as possible - and that in itself is self-evident because 'otherwise no one will use the services in the system'.
The fact that they have also managed to deliver on this is noticeable - the services are really used:
- 96% of income tax returns are filed electronically
- 99% of banking transactions are done electronically
- 31% of residents vote electronically
What have they done in Estonia that we have not done in Sweden? Simply put, they have changed their entire way of thinking to enable the digitalization of society to the benefit of citizens. Everything from legislation to compensation systems has had to be changed to give ordinary Estonians the digital prerequisites to manage their everyday lives easily and rationally.
Falling may have been fatal for Goliath. But falling for good examples from the world around us is something that more of us should do more often, because we can learn a lot! Imagine if we also dared to break old patterns, think completely new and invest in really creating value by using the digital opportunities of today and tomorrow! Learn from Estonia and our other neighboring countries, Sweden - that would really be a step forward!