4 things to make your eID project a success

Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2010, account for more than a quarter of the world’s population. These people are now entering the workforce and becoming taxpayers. According to a Gartner anaylsis, they are less inclined to trust companies and brands, they expect to be heard and involved, and often seek out employers and brands that offer authentic and transparent experiences. The generation before them, the Millennials or Generation Y, is not so different in these respects. Born between 1980 and 1995, they account for another quarter in the global population. Like Generation Z, they also increasingly expect their governments to offer authentic transparent experiences, and treat them as valued customers.

E-services can help tackle this challenge, but to get to a fully functional digital government, a shift in mindset is needed. eID is the cornerstone to achieving a more transparent society where the government is a service provider, but the real societal change comes from making living easier by creating seamless and easy ways to communicate with the government.

Implementing a strong and widely accepted electronic identity sends a powerful message from the government that citizens and their time are highly valued. Not queuing in government offices for hours allows people to get on with their daily lives and create more value for society. As digital transformation requires time and patience, it’s crucial to map out the first services that will create the most impact.

It is crucial to understand that the transformation to a strong eID, that is acknowledged by several stakeholders, is not something that happens overnight. By focusing on strategy and vision first, you can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to go through with this reform.

Every meaningful change starts with a strategy and a vision that states where you want to be. It’s important to answer questions such as why do you need eID in the first place and what exactly will people, the users, gain from it. Technological innovations have made our lives more complicated than they have ever been, meaning that people are much busier than they were even ten years ago. This has brought about a shift in how organizations see and treat their end users. Competition between enterprises is fiercer than ever and the same applies to countries – it is clear that when international investors are thinking about where to bring their next big adventure, they consider very carefully how easy it is communicate with the state and how the government treats tax payers.

All this needs to be thought through when you formulate a strategy for building and implementing eID. Once you have the strategy, it is also important to have a plan for how you will go through with the change. Change management is one of the crucial components in achieving lasting societal change. What services does the organization have to establish, what existing processes are you transitioning into new processes, what information exchange is necessary with other organizations and society, are a few of the questions to be answered before going digital. It is important to remember that changes in policy and processes should also be communicated to the broader public in a way that everyone can understand and relate to. Planning the communication should already start during policy drafting.

Just creating the infrastructure for eID is not enough. People will only start seeing the value and using their eID if there are services and policies to support it. Private e-services get the most out of the value of the system – this means that getting the private sector onboard is of key importance.

In Estonia, banks were a great help in promoting electronic identity. They saw it as a great way to have a secure and trusted way to authenticate people who wanted to use their services online. For them, it was also a great way to get customers to sign transactions digitally as an additional security measure.

This allowed banks to save on the cost of running their own sophisticated eID scheme and rely on the identities confirmed by the government – as they do in the physical world. Today, government provided electronic identity is a widely used means for authenticating loyal customers in the private sector, be it telecoms or retail.

Nortal’s analysts have the expertise to assist you in building an infrastructure that makes it comfortable and easy to use eIDs – that includes among others training and support for developers. We can also help create bridges between the public and private sectors to create additional services and incentives for the private sector to get on board.

Technology is definitely an important part of building and implementing a successful eID, but to be quite honest, tech is just a small part of it all.

Only a few of all the large-scale transformation projects are successful. Those projects are successful because they are not run as “yet another IT project”. Instead, there’s a holistic approach where all parties know that before you start coding, you need to have a clear vision of where you want to go, a strategy to achieve this, a plan to manage change and communicate it to the public. We estimate that creating the most suitable technology for eID makes up only about 20% of the project. For a successful eID, different tech solutions can be used, depending on what the client sees as a successful eID. Together, we can find a solution that best suits your users’ needs.