Blog & podcast
When it comes to political participation, elections represent something that most countries have in common, but that differentiates them between each other at the same time. All democratic nations set rounds of voting to renew people’s representatives in national assemblies; however, almost all nations vary in the ways elections are carried out. From registration to […]
Read more
In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, countries undertook years’ worth of digital transformation in a matter of weeks. The public sector – traditionally viewed as the slower player in the digital game– accelerated its innovation efforts to keep countries in function while decreasing risks to public health. It was only natural that governments would […]
Read more
Much as in the fight against Covid-19, prevention proves to be a key determinant of our safety on the internet. However, deliberate threats to both citizens and organisations still hide just around the corner. Despite our individual care and attention towards cyber behaviours, malicious actors might intentionally try to hijack personal data or information systems. […]
Read more
Where do we come from? Where do we stand? And where to go from here? Though the feeling might be that of a high-school psychology blog, there is no existentialism in these questions – at least in the current case. In order to formulate with efficacy digital transformation roadmaps for governments, policy makers must first […]
Read more
To many, the road to e-governance may seem rocky. Not only during some client meetings, but also in seminars and just conversations in general, an age-old question is often brought up: “Digitalization, okay, great. But there are too many legal obstacles to implement it in our country.” Today, we get this one off the board […]
Read more
Young people are the most reluctant social group to engage in voting. Research has clearly shown that across the past two decades, starting from seminal works on social capital and democratic participation, citing diverse explanations – from a decline in the perceived value of voting, to general disaffection towards institutions and party systems. In the […]
Read more
In the last few years, the Government of Ukraine has endeavoured incessantly to detach itself from paper-based procedures, to enable and provide e-services, and to reduce corruption with the help of IT-solutions and of the secure data exchange platform ‘Trembita’. How has Ukraine managed so far? What to highlight in terms of successes and setbacks […]
Read more
In today’s episode, Hannes Astok and Linnar Viik shed light on the world’s best driver of digital transformation – the COVID-19 pandemic. They talk about the main obstacles in the way of a defining moment for digital transformation in many countries. We know that paper-based public services are practically useless when whole countries are shut […]
Read more
Since 2014, the yearly appointment with the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) of the European Commission is a perfect opportunity to assess the state of affairs on digitalization in all Member States. The 2020 issue of the Index, despite relying on data previous to the pandemic outbreak, gives us the possibility to evaluate countries’ […]
Read more
Keywords: DESI, Digital technology, e-Services, Estonia, ICT in Education/e-kool, ICT infrastructure
Nothing is easy when there is a global pandemic in action. We have come to learn this the hard way, all of us, experiencing in first person all the problems and setbacks caused by the Covid-19 crisis. And still, in times where face-to-face contact is forcefully restricted, we can rely on resources for learning, communicating, […]
Read more
| The project is responsive to the following SDG of the United Nations: 17 | How did we manage to reach 160 countries in the NCSI? This is a blog post about the barriers, lessons learnt and interesting facts of the management of the NCSI. The NCSI is one of those projects that […]
Read more
Keywords: Küberturvalisus/Cybersecurity, NCSI
| Activities are responsive to the following SDGs of the United Nations: 11 – 16 – 17 | In a democratic society, the quality of the relationship between governments and citizens is a key talking point – and if not, most probably it should. Across the layers of governance, municipalities certainly represent the closest governmental […]
Read more
As social distancing is enforced in most parts of the world, the Covid-19 outbreak has already issued a concerning verdict. We might be living in the information age, but digitalization has yet to reach – whether partly or in full – key components of the way life and service provision are organized. Naturally, healthcare jumps […]
Read more
Digital transformation experts of the Estonian-based consultancy organisation e-Governance Academy have encouraged countries to facilitate e-governance and public e-services for more than 17 years. To date, the main arguments to develop public e-services were the hassle-free, transparent and more efficient governance to save time and money. The current Corona pandemic added one more argument: e-governance […]
Read more
| Activities are responsive to the following SDGs of the United Nations: 11 – 16 – 17 | “No man is an island”, as English poet John Donne famously wrote. The ties people establish within a community tell us how healthy democratic life is. Be it in a municipality, a region, or a […]
Read more
The turn of the decade brings new trends shaping the way governments deal with innovation. And who better than our own Linnar Viik could shed a light on the underlying dynamics setting the agenda for public digital development in the next ten years? In our latest post, we reviewed four ages of e-governance. The time […]
Read more
Public sectors are not immobile subjects whose ways and processes are set in stone. Indexes and rankings help us portray a state-of-the-art situation but, sometimes, we need to zoom out. Is it possible to identify general macro-trends in the past thirty years of governmental digital transformation? And what do they tell us about foreseeable […]
Read more
Keywords: Digital transformation, e-Governance
| The project is responsive to the following SDGs of the United Nations: 5 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 16 – 17 | There seems to be shared consensus over the necessity for governments to keep up the pace with digital transformation. It is one of the positive, external pressures triggered by living in the age of the information society. Citizens’ expectations for efficient […]
Read more
Keywords: Digital transformation, e-Governance