Why Don’t We All Become Estonia?

By Shlomo Maital

Estonia – digital society

      Estonia — the Republic of Estonia — is a small, clever country on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, population 1.3 million. It is the most digital country in the world. People vote online, pay taxes (in 20 minutes) online, and the government has meetings online (for ministers who are abroad and travelling).

     Clearly, this is the future. You can provide quality services to your citizens by moving them online, saving queues, money and frustration.

       So – recently, at an entrepreneurship conference in Mexico, I asked the Vice-Minister of Economics, from Estonia, (who briefly presented how Estonia has digitized public services),   why don’t other countries beat a path to his door to learn how?

       Of course, he did not know…and the question really was directed at my own country, Israel, and other countries, including the US.

       This is a mystery. Countries have closed their windows and doors. They do not practice best-practice benchmarking, when the benefits of using it are huge.

     Well-run businesses regularly and systematically benchmark their key business processes against the best practices of other organizations, both within their industry and outside it. Countries, too, are businesses. Countries should also practice best-practice benchmarking, as a fundamental policy tool, by asking two simple questions: What do other nations do better than we? And how can we adapt and adopt what they do, to improve the wellbeing of our citizens? Knowledge of best practices is in general not privileged or secret, is widely available, yet is significantly underused by countries, including Israel, even though the benefits of using it can be striking.

   Israel has spent fortunes on a plan to digitize public services – but typically, we seem to have reinvented the wheel, rather than benchmarked other nations like Estonia, who are light years ahead of us.

     Why? When our ministers go on junkets abroad regularly and spend fortunes on them, why do they not visit places where they can learn?  

     A small suggestion: When the Prime Minister and other ministers return from forays abroad, make this a Law —   stand in front of a camera and tell us what you learned, what your take-home was, and what you intend to apply here at home, to make life better for your voters and citizens.   Bring us valuable take-homes, not just suitcases stuffed with things from Macy’s.