Many countries are redesigning their public services by the life event based logic, but most of these countries consider life event services as one-sided way of providing information about the services organised according to the needs of users on a central website. In Estonia we have a more complex and ambitious approach. Our objective is to automatically and proactively offer a person in case of a life event services related to that event through web applications as one user experience.

The family benefits service is the first automated and proactive event-based service in Estonia. Before, parents had to apply for the family benefits after the registering the birth of the child, now once the birth is registered in the population register and the child is given a name, the Social Security Board will send an e-mail about the family benefit offer that parents can either accept or reject.

Currently, the first part of the redesigned and prototyped having a child event service, the proactive offering of family benefits, is developed and live. Next steps are:
• Automation of rest of the services related to the having a child (ongoing)
• Redesigning and prototyping 4 other life event services: death of a relative, getting married, retiring and going into the military service (May 2020)
• Developing a uniform development and management model for event services (May 2020)
• AS-IS mapping of 10 other event services and creating an action plan for their further development (December 2019)

• Expecting families and parents of new-borns were involved in user workshops in order to map user needs and validate the prototype.
• Government officials from 3 hospitals, 2 local governments and 5 authorities were involved throughout the design process (AS-IS and TO-BE workshops, validation of the results).

Proactively provided family benefits:
• Parents of the new-borns – family benefits are provided proactively to the parents via a portal without having to apply for them.
• Social Insurance Board – no need to process applications anymore as the service is provided to the parents automatically based on the data in the databases.

As the proactive family benefit project has been live for less than 2 months, there is no solid metrics available yet. The Social Security Board pays family allowances to 156,000 people and parental benefits to 19,000 people for €44 million each month. The biggest impact for citizens will be time saving and for the public sector both time and money saving because there is no need to process applications anymore. Before implementing this solution, 30% of the customer support calls were related to the application of the family benefits and 30% of the applications were not correctly submitted and parents had to submit additional information or documents.

In the future, there is a plan to measure all the life event services at least in 4 categories: user satisfaction, time spent, cost of the service and number of use cases.

There have not been any significant failures or setbacks yet. In case of the automation of the family benefit service, one of the biggest challenges was to define all the business rules, their interdependence and making sure there are no loopholes.

In case of designing the new having a child life event one of the challenges was to agree on the scope. In order to keep the scope manageable, it was agreed upon that the main flow (services that apply to most use cases) will be the first to be developed and once this is done, services related to exceptions will be added.

As life event services include services provided by different organisations, one of the challenges is to agree upon the development and management model of the event services. Three alternatives to the model were proposed and the most suitable one was chosen by public sector top managers during 3 workshops (approx. 60 managers).

Successful implementation of event services requires to have a certain degree of ICT maturity, i.e. a minimum critical number of digitalised services that can be appropriately identified, triggered, and implemented without human intervention during event service delivery. This requires the readiness of the workplace and the agency's work processes to function 24/7 and the national technical interoperability of the various parties.

Political will and readiness as well as top managements support is needed to guarantee that it is a priority on the national scale as it requires greater cooperation between different parties.

As all the public proceedings and service provision is based on legislation, it is crucial that the legislation that supports and allows proactive service offering.

The automated and proactive family benefits offering can be replicated in many other application based services. The same logic will be used for the rest of the having a child life event service development, as well as all the other life event services. This innovation can be replicated by every public sector organisation that has the necessary ICT maturity.

• Services that apply to most use cases (the main flow) should be the first to be developed. Once the composition of this has been done, exceptional services could be added.
• Major simultaneous developments with too broad of a scope should be avoided. The maximum scope should not be more than 10 services.
• It is important to agree upon the management and development model of the life event services. It should be done before starting the development of a service that involves different authorities and agencies.