X-Road – interoperability services

The 21st century citizen-centred state and service-oriented society requires information systems to function as an integrated whole to support citizens and organisations. There must be interoperability between different organisations and information systems.

In other words they must be able to work together and data only needs to be requested from the citizen once. Estonia’s solution for maintaining a modern state is X-Road, which saves Estonians 1345 years of working time every year.

In Estonia, public organisations have their own information systems to process information relevant to the state and its citizens to provide public services. These often run on different systems that suit the function of the organisation. X-Road is a distributed information exchange platform that makes it possible for these 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. But to do this X-Road must satisfy three criteria. First the platform must be interoperable and technically easy for each member of the system to access the data they need. Second, the data cannot be corrupted in transit by the system or an external third party. And third, the data must be protected from prying eyes so that unauthorised individuals cannot view the content of the data en route. X-Road has satisfied all three criteria since 2001, performing all the required functions for the state and the people of Estonia. 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.