e-Estonia Programme for the State of Rhode Island

Estonians are pathfinders, who have built an efficient, secure and transparent ecosystem that saves time and money. e-Estonia invites you to follow the digital journey. The initial part introduces and demonstrates the underlying mechanisms involved in digitizing a society, an overview of the main challenges and policies, an understanding of the infrastructure, e-solutions and services.

Nortal is a multinational strategic change and technology company. Combining the unique experience of transforming Estonia into a digital leader and creating change in businesses with a strategic approach and data-driven technology, Nortal’s vision is to build a seamless society. Nortal partners with governments to bolster business through intelligent public administration.

Nortal has planned and implemented over 40% of Estonia’s digital disruption, including in the domains of e-Tax, e-Healthcare etc. We have unique experience building a digital, seamless society. Nortal has successfully exported its expertise to countries in North-America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We know how difficult this change can be, but wealso know how much value it creates.

The e-Government development in Estonia is led by the office of Deputy Secretary General for Digital Development (Ministry of Economic Affairs). This section would cover how Estonia has reached this level, what is needed to keep the services up to date and what are the future plans.

The X-Road is the backbone of e-Estonia and was initiated by the Estonian government to enable secure data exchange between governmental organisations. The first version was developed by Cybernetica and launched in 2001. X-Road is a distributed information exchange platform that makes it possible for all different systems to communicate all across the governmental sector; for example, the police can access data from the health system, tax board or business registry and vice versa. It has enabled to increase the depth of cooperation between public organisations and reduced paper work exponentially so that public employees can concentrate on tasks that require human interaction.

CybExer Technologies is a NATO-awarded Estonian cybersecurity company that has wide-ranging experience in providing and maintaining highly sophisticated cyber security training platforms with a special focus on cyber capability development. The platforms are the key to successful delivery of a plethora of cybersecurity trainings and exercises aimed at ordinary users, technical responders and the very top of strategic leadership. CybExer’s flagship service is the development, operation and maintenance of next-generation, state-of-the-art, cyber ranges. Ultimately, it offers a safe environment where personel, technical, and organisational cyber security capabilities can be assessed, analyzed, and developed.

Proud Engineers is a boutique team of architects (engineers, lawyers and institution builders) with hands-on experience building Estonia’s digital society. The company was founded by former government CIO Taavi Kotka. More than strategy, we solve the big digital transformation challenges for governments and large corporations. Genuine digital society is more than e-Government, it depends on tight collaboration between the private and public sectors and continuous engagement with citizens. So Proud Engineers works closely with both national and enterprise partners across the world to transform their societies.

Startup Estonia is a governmental initiative aimed to supercharge the Estonian startup ecosystem in order to be the birthplace of many more startup success stories to come. For that, we are working on making Estonia one of the world’s best places for startups, partnering with and uniting the best of startups, incubators, accelerators, private and public sector. Find out what makes Estonia one of the best places on earth to create and run a start-up.