Comment: Scotland should look to Estonia for the digital future

Tech industry observer Mark Thomson shares his experience of the Digital Scotland conference and why we should take notes from societies such as Estonia.

Tallinn, Estonia. Estonias tech sector had four unicorns and attracted £500m funding in 2018. Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Last month more than 400 people from across government, industry and the third sector gathered for Digital Scotland 2019 at Strathclyde University’s Technology & Innovation Centre. The event mission statement was: working together to deliver Scotland’s digital future.

Kate Forbes, Scotland’s first and recently appointed digital minister, opened the conference in buoyant fashion. “Tech,” she said, “will be the fastest growing sector in Scotland by 2024. Not just a huge opportunity for our economy, not just a huge opportunity for research and development and innovation but an opportunity for people the length and breadth of the country to collaborate and position Scotland at the forefront of the digital revolution.”

Sounding a note of caution, she spoke of the dangers of getting bogged down in the means rather than the end. “The tech may be exciting but ultimately ‘this is about how we transform people’s lives.” And reminding the audience that “no one institution has a monopoly on delivering Scotland’s digital future.”

Collaboration, then, was the theme of this year’s conference. But equally important, as stated by the government’s own commissioned report for the Sustainable Growth Commission: Scotland-The New Case for Optimism: “We should maintain a keen and intelligent eye on the experience of other countries and work hard to bring that inspiration and evidence to bear on our own thinking and tailor our policies to our own unique conditions.”

Denmark, Finland and Estonia are often referenced as appropriate comparisons and benchmarks for successful digital societies. So it was significant that the international keynote speaker was Linnar Viik, who, two evenings previously, had delivered an inspirational talk to Scottish Parliament on his country’s experience of digital government.

Viik is regarded as one of the architects of Estonia’s “Tiger Leap” from small soviet socialist republic to Baltic powerhouse, and it is a remarkable transformation by any measure: a country of just over one million people with a budget, as Viik stated, “ten times smaller than any other OECD country” is now one of the most advanced countries in Europe. It was literally a grass roots movement, as he recalls. “We got the trucks, went every day to a new city, central square, and started to introduce how to use computers. And in ten days’ time 25 per cent of society started to use free web based email services; the same fall 85 per cent of society started to use digital tax declaration for their personal use, making more things every day, teaching a thousand people, one and half thousand people. And they became competent and started to teach other people, made an avalanche to happen.”

At the heart of this transformation was government; crucially, allowing citizens to interact in a meaningful and transparent way with public services. In 2007 Estonian citizens were the first to be able to vote online. And it is this bottom-up approach which has allowed the country to build a thriving digital economy on top of its citizen first architecture. In 2018 Estonia had four tech unicorns and attracted £500 million of investment to its tech sector, suggesting that a thriving digital economy is built precisely on those values of investing first and foremost in its people.

We lag behind. The evidence is stark and unavoidable whichever way you spin it. But what is equally clear is that we possess many of those same qualities as Estonia: a small population and, consequently, agile government able to respond quickly to global changes. We are also rich in natural resources, overflowing with human capital – the envy of the world for our research and education facilities.

Later that afternoon I listened as professor Bill Buchanan from Edinburgh Napier School of Computing demonstrated a convincing model of how a society like those that exist in Estonia and Finland with their X-Road e-government infrastructure might be run here on distributed ledger technology.

Buchanan, also head of the Blockchain Identity Lab and an OBE for services to cyber security, said: “I don’t think we have that roadmap that Finland and Estonia have actually got, to say this is what our future will look like. We need to define an architecture for Scotland, we need to define a grand vision.”

The Estonian government claims that its e-government infrastructure has led to annual savings of about 2 per cent of GDP and 1,400 years in working time for the public and private sectors. With the latest SFC forecast predicting a deepening black hole over the next three years that could be up to £1 billion, it’s clearly time to look at how we can start implementing technologies now that will save us in the future.

Scotland’s GDP in 2018 was estimated at £178.6bn. I’ll leave you to do the math.