Life event based services are centered around radical citizen centricity and the idea that a citizen should not have to search for services (or benefits) they need and are entitled to – it should be offered to them seamlessly and proactively by the state (based on the data already known). An important part of the innovation is redefining public sector service design by prioritizing citizen-centric experiences, following citizens' major life events, and reducing bureaucratic complexities significantly. The state portal (www.eesti.ee) serves as a seamless window for citizens to access necessary institutions effortlessly. It guides individuals through various processes that are a necessity when experiencing a life event. Additionally, it establishes a unified format for partner institutions and service providers to interface and begin offering and delivering life event based services.

Our incremental approach ensures a steady delivery of innovation, learning, and refining after each phase to provide value to citizens continually. While the status of a single life event based public service varies among services and institutions, the platform has been successfully launched, and the new life event based service framework has been created. In the initial phase, service owners consolidate essential life event information in one accessible location.

To enhance proactiveness and facilitate data exchange, ongoing analysis, needs assessments, and user tests are conducted. The current project phase focuses on establishing a solid foundation for proactiveness, with the next step of achieving prerequisites and launching personalized life event based services. In 2024, two services will be personalised, allowing the citizens to receive personalised information about the progress of the service in one place, in addition to general information.

The development process of life event based services involves collaboration among various stakeholders. Service owners, usually government officials, partner with the private sector, occasionally involving research institutions. This collaborative effort ensures that each service is designed based on end user insights, recent social trends, and domain historical data, coupled with UI/UX design and development expertise from partners, resulting in the creation of well-rounded and user-centric services.

Citizens, as the primary users, benefit from more transparent, convenient, personalised, and trustworthy public services. Service owners (officials) experience increased efficiency in services offered by using innovative technologies and new life-event service frameworks.
The central platform allows the state to review the services' costs, resources, usage and efficiency in addition to enhancing accessibility to public services, creating transparency, and increasing citizens' engagement.

Making public services digitally accessible benefits users by reducing the effort and resources needed to obtain government services; in addition, it eliminates the need to gain awareness about user eligibility for government services. The innovation is ongoing with promising feedback from potential end users. The goal of consolidating relevant data about citizens' life events is already achieved through the info service. For service providers, life event based services increase the reach of services and greater policy effectiveness. Also, this approach provides higher efficiency in service provision. Future measurement plans include monitoring categories like the number of use cases, user satisfaction, time-on-task, client-support contact-takings, and cost of the service.

The challenge we have encountered is the high level of complexity on the business and technical side. A single life event can have connections to many partial services and, therefore, institutions. The extensive cooperation network among governmental and local institutions demands substantial resources for stakeholder management and governance, and therefore, clear owners and a strong communication strategy must exist.

The current legal framework is outdated and cannot handle situations emerging from developing life event based services. Changes in the legal space take a lot of time and effort. Also, life event based services handle highly sensitive personal data, raising the complexity of legal policies and related processes.

Following are the pre-conditions for the success of life event based services:

• Willingness to experiment with a user-centric services mindset.
•  Legislation to enable data processing and digital identification.
• Technical infrastructure as a secure data exchange layer to ensure secure data transfers and digital identity to verify citizens and provide access to services.
• A central state portal to provide one central access point for services.
• Good cooperation between authorities and independent service owners to build and maintain life event based services.

To our knowledge, this innovation has not been replicated to address similar problems as it requires the existence of digital identity and supporting governmental infrastructure, but we assess that the potential for a life event based services approach is highly replicable in the near future. The reasons include its suitability for solving user problems, technical and business scalability, and the ease of copying the life event based services model with reusable platform components. Locally, the developed materials are already utilized for onboarding each subsequent service, showcasing its potential for broader replication.

Unsurprisingly, for large-scale and multi-faceted projects like this, an advanced communication strategy is needed to raise awareness and set clear messages. It is crucial to agree upon the management and development model of the life event based services, and it should be done before starting the development of a service that involves different authorities and agencies.
 Also, major simultaneous developments that are too broad of a scope should be avoided.

When developing user-centric life event based services, it is good to keep in mind that users do not make a difference between different services and sub-services nor do  they care about them. They just want to get things done with minimum effort and maximum results.