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Kim Borg, CIO/CTO/CDO, Lilla Edets kommunPrior to entering the government administration domain, I had expected to find gaps in technological innovation and awareness of technical knowledge among government and municipal bodies. True to my expectations, there are indeed lots of areas where there are immense possibilities to innovate, automate, and add numerous efficiencies through technology use. This is one of the chief reasons I began working in this domain.
How did you come to work in the government administration domain?
I’ve been working in the past in consultant roles in different spaces, primarily as an IT consultant. I’ve worked in projects on user experience (UX), system development and construction, automation, and a variety of different technologies. This experience provides me a solid ground in determining the right features of the tech solutions that we have to develop or purchase for specific functions.
A few years back, I made my way to the government and municipal area, bringing my skills in IT consultancy. With my prior experiences, I’m in a good position to utilize the possibilities of technology use in government administration for Lilla Edets kommun.
Could you elaborate on the trends that you witness in the public sector technologies and e-governance?
In many ways, at least in Europe today, data protection has become a huge topic of discussion. Protecting our data in the best manner possible is a need that is growing by leaps and bounds. There are pressing questions that require careful consideration: how should we approach data protection? How much data should P we put into the large scale data clouds? How much and what data should we protect, whether it’s personal data or industry data? When it comes to how and what type of information we have within the municipal and government areas, we have to be aware of certain data that we have to protect at all costs. This is a big, ongoing discussion.
Meanwhile, we are seeing a lot of changes in the way plenty of large scale cloud providers are trying to navigate and find their way in managing and protecting data. On top of this, many of the local laws on data privacy currently clash with each other. It is quite a mess. This makes it challenging to determine how we should approach this issue, where to invest and what to focus on. But we have to face these concerns and find a way through this anyway.
"We have to continue making the right choices on how we store data and how we use the data in public clouds"
The way we are tackling this issue is by trying to avoid putting ourselves in a difficult situation where there is an imbalance between data in public domain and data privacy laws. As part of our attempts at finding a balance, we only store some data in the public cloud. We don’t take risks with sensitive data, and so store it in more local regional data centers. Through this approach, it’s quite possible to handle data privacy without putting all the data in the public clouds.
How do public companies and government organizations find the right balance between gathering data for smart city management and public safety and GDPR compliance?
There are multiple businesses and all sorts of actors in this endeavor of balancing public data gathering with GDPR protocols. It is certainly a huge task for every stakeholder in the process, and everyone is trying their best to leverage their individual expertise in resolving the data privacy issues. For us, too, it’s a big task to accomplish.
The involvement of countless actors within the wide government administration space makes it quite difficult to keep track of the gathering and usage of public data. As of today, we have come across a lot of cases where we find crucial data exposed indefinitely. These incidences will continue to rise, as we currently have no proper tool that we can use to regulate data gathering and usage. It is up to the government bodies and public companies to find and evaluate the avenues for proper usage of this data.
Nevertheless, as long as everybody involved works in a structured way, routinely evaluating whatever information they have on the usage of public data, there won’t be issues. While we do have the technology to collect information on public data usage today, but we still have to continue making the right choices on how we use the data and in what services.
From your experience, could you give a few words of advice to leaders in the government administration space?
The trick to navigating the government administration space is to not make decisions all by yourself. This is necessary as the world has become incredibly complex today, which means there are multiple touch points when it comes to decision making. So, it has become pretty much impossible for just one or a few persons to make the right choices. My message for government and municipal bodies would be: invite domain experts and take the opportunity to gather and involve the right people with the right competence and expertise while making administrative decisions.
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