For The Building A More Trusted World: Countries With Vision Win Every Time

The world looks to Estonia as a model of how to build a more trusted digital world. As I fill in forms for my GP and print out my email address — which will never be used by the GP — with pen on paper, and tick boxes for illnesses that I can remember that me and my family have had, Estonia goes ahead and implements its health care system in a purely digital way. And, as I receive bits of paper through my letterbox which say “Dear Occupier, Please can you tell us who lives in your house?”, Estonia knows every citizen by their first name.

I live in an old world — based on old ways of doing things — and Estonia lives in a new world — and which is more trusted, dynamic and which can adopt faster to change. My government often sees digital services as putting a paper-based system into an online format, and fails to see the complete rebuilding that is required. I often shake my head in disbelief that at the insignificant amounts of funding aimed at “transform” our public services — and basically which just converts a paper-based system into an on-line form.

The conversion of something from paper, to a desktop application, and then to a Web form, is not actually transforming things, as it lacks a solid foundation for scaling across every digital service. Until we create an infrastructure which…