Carol's party won the national elections because voters knew it was high time for some real changes. And as the new finance minister, it was up to her to make some of the hardest of those changes – significant cuts in government spending.

But her first decision was easy: she imported the e-Cabinet system she'd heard about in Estonia, knowing it would save money and radically alter the way the government was run.

Once she got the system in place and the PM on board, the improvements were immediate and obvious.

Instead of ministers and their assistants hauling armfuls of folders and documents to the cabinet meetings, they started toting sleek laptops containing those very same documents, all neatly organized in an electronic format.

Soon Carol's colleagues were reading the PM's weekly agenda well before the meeting, and letting him know in advance whether they wanted to raise objections to his proposals. Thanks to that change in habit, the meeting times dropped from half-day affairs to ones that lasted barely an hour.

At the end of the day, Carol calculated, the ten ministers would collectively be saving 30 work hours per week, which they could devote to other important things, and had drastically cut down on paper use. Best of all, armed with their laptops and can-do attitudes, Carol knew that this government was hungry for more innovations, and she was just the woman to bring them on.