ECePS ERA Chair of
e-governance and digital public services focuses on research on digital transformation of the public sector, by looking into why and how digital transformation works in
practice, and how different digital solutions can be employed across fields.
The ERA (European Research Area) Chair is funded by European Commission with a
goal to support University of Tartu in strengthening our existing research team
in e-governance. The ECePS
research team is led by Professor Vincent Homburg.
Our
research focuses on four distinct directions:
Changes in organizations and in
government-citizen relations. Our team analyses how organizations change with digital
transformation, and how relations with citizens change as digital
transformation takes place.
Improving government decision-making via digital tools. We help to develop, pilot and
assess the impact of digital tools and services that enable evidence-based
policy-making. These include decision support tools based on public data
and dashboards for automated, real-time service impact assessment.
Digital open government
co-creation.
Improving the use of digital tools to bring government closer to citizens,
such as through internet voting systems, and to build trust in e-services.
This includes analysis of social trust and acceptance of new e-governance
technologies
E-Government related policy analysis and developing policy
recommendations.
This includes analysis of cross-border e-services and implementation of
the EU Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR).
The ECePS ERA Chair final conference "Promises and Paradoxes of Open Data" will take place on Thursday, 13. February 2025 at the UT Delta Centre, in Tartu, Estonia.
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ECePS ERA Chair is part of Center of IT Impact Studies (CITIS). Founded in 2015, CITIS is an integrated teaching and research center at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu. The center uses big data generated by various Estonian public e-services (such as internet voting, mobile parking, e-health, digital ID, e-residency, etc) to estimate the economic, political and social impact of those services and to design new services and e-governance solutions. CITIS is one of the few research groups in Estonia focusing on quantitative assessment and modelling of the impact of public e-services. Through the creation of new courses and various teaching activities, CITIS researchers contribute to the development of a new generation of analysts and scientists, dedicated to understanding and improving the way that public e-services impact the daily functioning of the state. Lessons learned from Estonia are in turn helpful in promoting and developing public e-services internationally. In addition to research and teaching activities, CITIS team aims to contribute to the development of the e-state directly by creating and testing prototypes for new e-services, based on cross-usage of existing data.
E-governance research in Estonia
–
a uniquely conducive environment
The ERA Chair in
e-Governance and Digital Public Services is based at the University of Tartu,
the leading institution of higher education in Estonia. Estonia has been at the
forefront of the digital transformation of the public sector for most of this
century. According to the Digital Economy and Society Index 2021, Estonia ranks
first in Europe in the provision of digital public services. Estonia has a
uniquely developed infrastructure for e-government, including ID cards that
provides a secure digital ID for digital authentication and digital
signatures, as well as the X-road, a secure distributed
state information system which enables cross-usage of registry data. As of January
2022, the X-road was used by over 52
000 public
and private organizations, and the number of services that could be used via
the system was 3111, generating nearly 1.5 billion service usage queries
annually (in a country with 1.3 million people). Over the years, a total of 1.4
billion digital signatures have been given. The country has been a champion in
remote internet voting since 2005 – nearly a half of all votes cast in the most
recent national and local elections were electronic votes. In 2014, Estonia
became the first country in the world to launch e-residency, a program that
provides non-residents access to the Estonian digital infrastructure and allows
them to start and manage EU-based companies online. The total number of
e-residents exceeds 85 000. This enables our team’s high level research to
contribute to the digital development of the public and private sector in
Estonia and beyond.
ECePS ERA Chair has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 857622. Views
and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not
necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive
Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held
responsible for them.
