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Ott Pärna: X - VIEW: Making Estonia the most user-friendly Internet country
17.12.2009
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The CEO of Estonian Development Fund, Ott Pärna,made a proposal to make Estonia the world's most user-friendly Internet country at the conference of Year of Innovation. By calling this undertaking X-VIEW, the leader of of Estonian Development Fund proposed to continue developing the e-state story from the perspective of the client and thus become the first actual country in the Internet. Pärna set his goal to "being to world's most comfortable country in the Internet by 2012" and "being the world's biggest country in the Internet by 2013". According to Pärna, countries in the Internet and other digital environments are still only developing their identity and so far no-one has had a big breakthrough. "Estonia has quite a lot of technically unique infrastructure beginning from the X-road, which allows integrated use of various databases and ending with the ID-card and digital signature system. All of this allows us to be a few steps ahead and a slightly more innovative in comparison with other countries. However, we are strong mainly in the back office. At the same time, when it comes to usability, we are rather stagnant; we have created numerous amounts of web pages which are often technically bumpy and service components which have compatibility difficulties - both on governmental and local level. These services and pages pose navigation difficulties even to users whose computer knowledge level is high above average. „ A recent and rather colourful experience by Üllar Jaaksoo, a college and the project director of IT academy, who failed in acquiring a fishing license in the .ee labyrinth, is a fitting example of the problem," said Pärna. The two main goals of X-VIEW First, to achieve a situation where most of the state and local government services have a much more similar appearance and usability level. At the same time, all of the services should be reachable from one user-friendly web portal ( see UK's example: http://www.direct.gov.uk/). The decrease of costs, time and nerves of people all speak in the favour of creating a similar interface platforms and using the "all from one place" approach. Thus a significant cost-reduction is achieved by developing service and client view platforms - the same concept is not bought over and over again and also the buyer of the development becomes more competent in the field. In addition, of course the improvement of quality is also achieved; updating the whole system becomes faster, the client support service and system integration with other, both private sector and international Internet environments, will improve. |
The second goal is to be the "biggest country in the Internet" by 2013 ". It is possible to give different definitions to what it means. At the same time, all countries are the same size in Internet. Every country appears exactly as big as the user's monitor. In other words, despite the fact that when it comes to territory, we are a small country, at least in the Internet we have the same possibilities as the big countries. Thus the role of Internet in encouraging both tourists and investors keeps growing. Whoever is more innovative, clear and organized, wins. If we had a truly favourable enterprise and tax environment, no-one would forbid us to give out Estonian ID-cards (not citizenship) to the entrepreneurs of the word and no-one would deny them the possibility to set up enterprises, holding companies or funds over the Internet. Something that one can currently do in Luxembourg for a big sum of money and using a fax machine, we could provide by using a much more modern method - doing it completely digitally. You are most welcome to offer ideas and cooperate with us. X-VIEW is an idea and proposal bank for all the organizations of public, third and private sector who feel the need and willingness to make Estonia the first Internet country of the world! Further information: |
