On the Systematic Exploitation of the Estonian Data Exchange Layer X-Road for Strengthening Public-Private Partnerships

The concept of Public-Private Partnerships has found a large variety of different approaches since the 1980s and each country has found its own interpretation. In later years, Estonia has also strengthened a collaboration between public and private sector, while a data exchange layer X-Road, initially developed for the public data sets to communicate, is now also been open for private entities to use and thus shows the great potential for Public-Private Partnerships to grow further. As there are still quite a small amount of private sector entities attached themselves to the X-Road, there must be the reason, why the private sector has not gone along with the platform. In order to find out how to design a unified platform for public agencies and private entities, authors have conducted face-to-face interviews as well as an online questionnaire among different private sector organizations. As a result, authors will provide various recommendations, in order to make a platform more acceptable for both public as well as private entities and to strengthen the intersectoral collaboration. The research was supported by the Estonian Information System Authority (EISA).