Designing an Effective Long-Term Identity Management Strategy for a Mature e-State

Countries that have a well-functioning e-governance ecosystem (infrastructure, processes, interoperability network, user-friendly e-services etc.) reach a particularly high e-governance maturity level. To ensure continuous development and adoption to the changing technological environment the systematic consideration of users’ needs is important in the definition of long-term strategical goals. Identity management is a corner stone of each mature e-governance ecosystem. This paper focuses on the process of creating the new Estonian strategy for identity management and identity documents and the analysis of this process from different aspects (responsibilities, engaged stakeholders and interest groups, key competences, scope, implementation). In addition, we give an overview of the underlying strategical and legal regulatory framework. The objective is to map the best practices and bottlenecks of the strategy creation process and propose a model for area specific long-term strategical documents. We aim at understanding best practices and bottlenecks in the process of creating the ID strategy. In service of this, we have conducted qualitative interviews with several high-ranking experts that have been involved as stakeholders in the strategy building process. Based on this, we propose a model for area-specific long-term strategical documents. Furthermore, the research results indicate that it is necessary to invest continuously into public-private partnership.