eGL's customised programme provided the Estonians with an overview of Singapore’s e-Government experience, infocomm development and education.

The many parallels between Estonia and Singapore intrigued the delegates of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications, who were in Singapore for a workshop organised by the eGovernment Leadership Centre or eGL (www.egl.sg) in October. Both are tiny nations surrounded by big countries, both leverage greatly on their geopolitical location and both grapple with manpower challenges because of their small population.

The Estonian association is a voluntary organisation that represents the interests of the country’s IT and telecommunications companies and promotes its development into an information society.

Its president, Mr Urmas Kolli, said the group had looked around the world to identify countries which were leaders in infocomm technology, and found Singapore to be very successful in this respect. “Singapore is ranked very high globally in infocomm development,” said Mr Kolli, who is also Chairman of the Board of Datel, one of Estonia’s leading information technology companies.

eGL custom-designed a programme that provided the 17 Estonian delegates with an overview of Singapore’s e-Government experience, the development of its infocomm industry, the provision of infocomm technology education, as well as Singapore’s e-business and sourcing strategies.

Commending the programme, Mr Kolli said, “Someone had spent a lot of time understanding what we were looking for and the programme was exactly what we needed…From this workshop, we got fresh ideas on how to solve some of our problems.”

For example, he noted that Estonia offered a very traditional model of infocomm training in contrast to Singapore’s approach, which was more flexible and included short infocomm technology courses. “This is one way to get around our shortage of infocomm manpower,” he said. “Through this, we can train up infocomm professionals more rapidly.”

Another delegate, Mr Indrek Jakobson from Estonia’s largest technology university, the Tallinn University of Technology, said what was interesting to him was Singapore’s experience in building up a successful infocomm system so quickly, and taking it so far with so little resources. “That’s very interesting to us because we see so many similarities between Singapore and Estonia,” said Mr Jakobson, who heads the university’s Technology and Innovation Centre. “I got four pages of ideas from the workshop.”