Skip to main content
Podcast

🎙️ e-Estonia podcast – CTO of Estonia, Kristo Vaher: Does Estonia dare to be second?

Article content

In our podcast’s third episode Florian Marcus talks to Kristo Vaher, the Chief Technology Officer of the Republic of Estonia. What Vaher shares, confirms that Estonia does dare to be second. Because one thing that this small digital nation keeps doing is learning and innovating. 

Vaher, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a tech evangelist, is the CTO of Estonia and works at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. Vaher shares the same office with e-governance power players Siim Sikkut, the CIO of Estonia, and Ott Velsberg, the Chief Data Officer of Estonia.

“Our office is primarily driving the policy. We need to make sure there is some sort of interoperability between the different parties contributing to our e-governance,” Vaher told our Digital Transformation Adviser Florian Marcus.

Following the policy of Jeff Bezos

As the governmental CTO, Kristo Vaher contributes to the strategic vision for the technologies chosen by the government, its technological roadmap, and innovation. He is also leading the engineering community from the public sector side. “I am coordinating between the different software architects so that they´d agree on principles and follow the requirements,” Vaher said.

Vaher quotes Jeff Bezos who once said organisations need to be strict and concrete in their policies and flexible in details. “We are following a similar principle in our e-governance and I suspect that is why we´re successful,” Vaher said.

The key to Estonian e-governance success

According to Vaher, the key to Estonian e-governance success lies in three things:

  1. The Estonian e-government structure has been strategically built in a decentralised manner.
  2. The government CIO office follows a principle once verbalised by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos – be really strict and concrete in your policies and flexible in details.
  3. Always learn from other countries going through digital transformation.

To hear in more detail what a governmental CTO does, what’s the latest in Estonian e-governance, and when will Estonia start using virtual assistants to help people interact with the government, tune in to listen on your preferred channel by clicking on the links below 👇

🎧Available on Apple Podcast and Spotify:

🎧…and on Soundcloud

Contact

Visit us physically or virtually

We host impactful events both in our centre and online for government institutions, companies, and media. You’ll get an overview of e-Estonia’s best practices and build links to leading IT-service providers and state experts to support your digitalisation plans.

Questions? Have a chat with us.

Call us: +372 6273157 (business hours only)
E-mail:
Media:

Find us

The Briefing Centre is conveniently located just 2 minutes drive from the airport and 7 minutes drive from the city centre.

You will find us on a ground floor of Valukoja 8, central entrance behind the statue of Mr Ernst Julius Öpik. Photo of the central entrance.

Valukoja 8
11415 Tallinn, Estonia