At meeting between the prime ministers of the Nordic countries, the Baltic states and the United Kingdom, Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip called on the heads of government to take concrete steps to open the way for cross-border use of e-services and proposed the international version of Estonia’s X-road medium as the solution, allowing countries and their government institutions to exchange data and develop joint services, reported Government Communication Unit.
“Today little data flows over the borders and if they do, in non-automated fashion – which is cumbersome and expensive,” said Ansip at the meeting. He cited the example that 20,000 paper documents are still exchanged each year between Estonian and Finnish social insurance registries – they are printed out and entered anew in the other country’s information system.
Estonia has already started talks with Finland and Latvia to launch the first pilot projects for interfacing services and databases. Similar cooperation is now being eyed with Great Britain. State Information Authority’s (RIA) Director General Jaan Priisalu and UK Government Digital Service's Chief Technology Officer, Liam Maxwell signed a memorandum of understanding on exchanging experience in developing simple and user-friendly public e-services. The memorandum states that the aim of the cooperation is to develop joint projects and initiatives, to increase the frequency and range of contacts between experts and share experience in the field of design, architecture and security of e-services.
“As companies and people move between countries, services and data should move together with them," Ansip said. He added that Estonia also wants to open similar initiatives with other countries in Europe.
Under the aegis of RIA, the latest development of the X-road is nearing completion: international software to serve as an interface between databases to allow data exchange to go forward across borders. Estonia’s main objective in developing the international version of X-road is to launch actual cross-border services based on this platform.
The Northern Future Forum is an annual non-formal cooperation format uniting the heads of government of the Nordic countries, Baltic states and Great Britain, where besides the prime ministers, policy experts and entrepreneurs also meet. This year the meeting was held for the third time, with the first one taking place in January 2011 in London, the second in February 2012 in Stockholm. The initiative for the format came from UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011.