August - 2020 19GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKsingle encounter with government per life-event. We have identified 15 major life-events that we will have redesigned by 2020 in this vain. In Estonia, we have all the underlying elements needed in place for this, such as the world's most extensive data exchange capability (based on X-Road platform) and strong digital identity. We just need to add some more automation, better integration, analytics collection and a whole lot more redesign. When you start a business, all the necessary paperwork should be processed immediately without requiring further registration of employees or licence approvals. When your child is born, the government should be able to send you a congratulatory e-mail with a link to provide us with the minimum amount of data we actually need to put your child in the system (what will be the name? which bank account you want the benefits to be sent to?) Currently, these questions can be answered online from your hospital bed before you leave for home with your newborn, but it takes five different websites with five different user experiences. We can improve them all, or we can take a bigger step to integrate them into a single interaction. Some interactions we can fully automate away. For example, we have been building automated reporting for businesses. If they consent to giving our government tax office direct access to their financial data (e.g. in accounting service or software), the companies will never have to submit any tax declarations, statistics, annual reports or other documents to the government ever again. Basically, by connecting directly to the data, the government can automate the bureaucracy away for entrepreneurs. They would no longer need accountants, and could focus on just doing their business. For micro-companies and SMEs, this usually is the case and they could get a radical efficiency boost this way.This is our vision as a government ­ to offer a zero-bureaucracy environment as often as possible using the digital tools. Most of such tools already exist. Often, the reuse of existing data and tools is enough. In the case of registering a child, as outlined above, the government already knows that the child was born as the hospital makes an entry into the population registry (before the child even has a name). A proactive interaction can already be triggered from this single data entry. New technologies and artificial intelligence first and foremost among them, make the direction to get rid of interactions with government even more possible ­ by making it possible to become predictive and, there-by, truly proactive in service delivery. But it's transforming how we do things in government that matters most, not tech. Most service needs arise in relation to specific events in the lives of citizens and businessesSiim Sikkut
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