Northern Ireland is looking to Estonia for examples of electronic government services. On 27 August, the two sides agreed in Tallinn (Estonia) to exchange experiences and to jointly develop e-government services.
The agreement was signed by Jaan Priisalu, director of Estonia's Information Systems Authority (RIA) and Paul Wicken, Chief Executive of Northern Ireland's Enterprise Shared Services (ESS) part of the region’s Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP).
According to RIA, Northern Ireland "is running an ambitious program on the digitisation of government services", and it would like to learn from Estonia's experiences. Northern Ireland wants to have 70 per cent of its government service web-based by 2019, RIA says.
Over the past two weeks, DFP did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls for comments.
According to RIA, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom are developing cross-border e-services. RIA hopes that this will also make the use of e-government services easier for Estonian citizens abroad.
Last year, RIA agreed to help the governments of Finland and the United Kingdom. The two countries are reusing or considering reusing RIA’s X-Road, a data exchange system for the secure web-based exchange of data between governmental organisations.
More information:
RIA news item (in Estonian)
OSOR news item
OSOR news item
OSOR news item