Yesterday Siim Sikkut and Kristo Vaher shared insights into creating an interoperable digital government to an international audience of policy leaders and experts at the latest round of Digital Nation’s webinar series on how to become a digital nation.

Kristo Vaher, Estonia’s former CTO divided the key to success in interoperability into 3 main categories:
🧩 Decentralised Architecture
🌐 Cross-Border Readiness
📑 Open Source Standards

If you missed the session here are 9 key takeaways that Kristo Vaher, Estonia’s former CTO and Digital Nation’s Technical Director presented for you to get started on your path in creating interoperable digital public services:

1. By integrating decentralised architecture you gain the ability to migrate technology.
2. A byproduct of decentralising your systems is creating cybersecurity which is fault tolerant.
3. Even if you decentralise your systems in play, you can still maintain central governance of your product stack.
4. Designing your systems with cross-border compatibility from the get-go enables you to be prepared at no extra cost, whilst preparing you for the future.
5. In an international world, shared languages enable shared business opportunities to prosper if the architecture surrounding the businesses ecosystem allow it by being interoperable.
6. When starting out, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Examples like GovStack, X-Road and federated data exchange are options for getting off the ground.
7. By procuring your systems using open source standards you may gain the right to IP.
8. Even if you can’t procure the services open source, you can still implement adapters to enable interoperability.
9. The lessons you learned can and will help someone else along the way, with any chance yourself in the future, so share and publish the fruits of your labour along with metrics.

“Interoperability isn’t a tech challenge: it requires policies and legal rules, careful change management, stakeholder engagement and governance, etc. That is why a good comprehensive interoperability roadmap is required, which also has to feature good showcase quick wins of new good interoperable public services,” Siim concluded, summarising the experience from several countries where Digital Nation has helped to kickstart or restart interoperability in government.