Exclusive: Estonia’s former CIO shares lessons on sustaining innovation

Estonia has one of the most well-known digital governments – it consistently tops rankings, has pioneered several open-source platforms that have been adopted by other countries, and continues to drive innovation.

Yet, can leaders of large and complex countries learn from this small country nestled away in northern Europe? The country, home to just over a million people, may seem too unique for its digital success story to be repeated elsewhere.

Estonia’s former Chief Information Officer, Siim Sikkut, doesn’t agree.

He says Estonia’s small size was an impediment in its early years – it meant that the country had limited manpower to drive digital efforts. Global tech companies were also less keen to invest in the newly independent country due to its small size, so the government had to figure things out from scratch.

Now, Siim and several other former architects of Estonia’s digital efforts have set up Digital Nation, a consultancy which provides digitalisation advice and practical, hands-on know-how to leaders from other countries.

“How can we help other countries unlock their potential?... Ultimately, what you can benefit from is others’ lessons. Our advisors basically share those lessons and insights,” Sikkut explains.

“Ideally, we’d love to work systematically with an ambitious country or a few to make them better than Estonia.”

Managing legacy while driving innovation

One challenge that Sikkut faced when stepping into his role as government CIO was managing the legacy systems that Estonia had already built up while driving new innovations. He joined the team in 2017 and departed in 2022, serving as Government CIO for five years. Prior to that, he spent five years as a policy advisor in the Government Office of Estonia, shaping digital policy across the government.

Many credit Estonia’s digital success to the fact that the country did not have legacy systems when it became independent in the 1990s. Over time however, the country developed its own forms of legacy that future leaders had to manage, explains Sikkut – but there is good and bad legacy.

He recommends the 80/20 rule for leaders who are facing this dilemma – spend 80 per cent of one’s resources improving and iterating on current systems, and the other 20 per cent building new innovations.

While Estonia was piloting its e-residency scheme, it continued enhancing its existing government stack, even as the team developed a new user group that could interface with the stack, he shares.

The 80/20 approach informed the country’s recent approach to artificial intelligence (AI), where the government identified practical, low-hanging use cases in various agencies to achieve quick wins, rather than developing an overly comprehensive AI model, he says – letting “as many AI flowers bloom as possible”.

 “As a leader, if you want to get something truly new like AI off the ground, you have to put your own time into that and not be over-consumed by whatever is happening in the background. You have to make yourself available and put yourself into these initiatives you really care about.”

Currently, there are over 100 AI applications at work within the Estonian government.

Prioritising user experience

Sikkut recommends that leaders shift from a tech-first mindset to focusing on user experience: improving the feel and function of services.

“Fundamentally, we save time and money… efficiency gain is the core of it,” he shares, when asked about how this has supported Estonian citizens.

Now, the country is embarking on personalised government: building services in a way that focuses on the citizen journey, bundles key services together, and uses AI to personalise the experience further.

But does “personalised government” just mean sending notifications to citizens?

The real benefit of personalised government is when fully automated services work invisibly in the backend, he explains – with many services somewhere in the middle of notifications and automation.

“In Estonia, the very first example was that if a child is born, they automatically get health insurance with no separate application… there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit,” he says.

“A lot of it is just basically better service design.”

Another initiative is the Bürokratt programme, a voice-activated virtual assistant that allows citizens to inquire about and receive access to various services, though the programme is taking longer than expected due to an initial lack of Estonian language resources, he shares.

Building foundations

He shares that many governments around the world are still in the process of putting in place the essential foundations, from data sharing platforms to ensuring cybersecurity and data governance.

Digital Nation was set up in part to support other countries in building those foundations, managing change, and improving service delivery.

“Ultimately, plans don’t matter, only delivery matters,” he says.

Sikkut adds that leaders should pursue quick wins over chasing big dreams; build lasting teams with the right culture that can persist over time; and reuse common platforms available through programmes such as the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

Funding models may also have to change to better support digital government efforts. Many public organisations offer project-based funding models, but tech companies constantly improve products in an agile way – funding should reflect this reality, he notes.

“It’s a different way of funding… more like an ongoing expenditure, as opposed to big chunks of investment… That to me is still an unsolved challenge,” he says.

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