Analytics, Economics, Estonia, Forum, Technology

Kaevats said at the "New Economic Model" conference of Tark law firm and Postimees on Friday that Estonia has one of the  best systems of digital distributed architecture compared with global data giants such as Facebook or Google.

"We have the world's best distributed architecture, where there is no Big Brother," he said.

Kaevats said that at the present level of technological development the priority for the state should be to build an architecture capable of adapting that can be changed rapidly to be always up to date.

"It doesn't have to be technology alone, a climate alone. We are capable of making an architecture capable of adapting," the official said.

"This is also what we are doing in Estonia in the digital view. We've been having distributed architecture, what we call the X-Road, but when we see this amount of data grow rapidly, change very vigorously, we must take a slightly different look at it," he said.

The day-to-day amount of changes is too big now for it to be possible to continue in the current linear way, the official added. 

According to Kaevats, Estonia has nevertheless coped well with technological change and possesses competence for coping with it.

"Our knowledge and skills of community building is what takes us forward," Kaevats said.

Kaevats also described some of the metaphors that we've been using to describe technological development as obsolete.

"Please let us no longer use the tiger's leap metaphor, it's outdated. We can no longer move with separate leaps. This tiger must learn new dance steps," he said. "It is not about individual leaps, it's about architecture of governance."