Recently, several mishaps have affected users in the ministry's domain, such as the failure of the SAIS3 admission system and incorrect feedback sent to people taking the University of Tartu's academic test.

Commenting on these incidents, Kotka noted they do not indicate Estonia's entire e-state is broken. Ministries develop solutions independently, meaning a central failure does not crash everything.

"However, there is a strong sense that for a very long time now, governance — particularly IT governance — at the Ministry of Education has been out of order. The fact that such fundamental problems keep happening very frequently absolutely shows that this needs to be taken completely apart and rebuilt from scratch," the former government CIO said.

Kotka stressed that if systems are to work well, everything starts with management. From the beginning, the goal of the commissioned systems, their expected load and key criteria must be clearly defined.

"Based on that, the right partners must be chosen and the work must be done properly. And there must be a firm stance that if a partner cannot deliver, that partner must be replaced," he said, adding ministries generally rely on external partners rather than developing systems themselves. "And I have the strong feeling that today the Ministry of Education does not demand quality from its partners, because if it did, we wouldn't be seeing these problems. It needs to be stricter."

He gave the example that when building a house, it is clear a leaking pipe must be fixed by the construction company. In IT, however, many flaws only emerge under heavier loads, making it difficult for clients like the ministry to argue with contractors.

"Let's be honest: in our court practice today, there is no real ability to hold the contractor at fault. In general, IT companies are able to argue everything away so that the client always ends up looking foolish. They say the work is done using the client's materials, and so on. Yet these IT firms always sell themselves as full-service providers. At the sales stage, they're in full bloom, but when things go wrong, they tend to blame the naive client — who often is naive. But that shouldn't matter," Kotka said.

He added that because court practice favors IT companies, there is no good way to get rid of bad partners other than terminating the contract and launching a new procurement.

In the interview, Kotka pointed out software development has become inexpensive, meaning there should be no fear of dropping a bad partner and starting from scratch.

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