Lilla Edet Municipality

How did you come to work in the government administration domain?

In the past, I worked primarily as an IT consultant in different spaces. I’ve worked on user experience (UX) projects, system development and construction, automation, and various technologies. This experience provides me a solid ground in determining the right features of the tech solutions we must develop or purchase for specific functions.

A few years back, I started working in the government and municipality, bringing my skills from IT consultancy. With my prior experiences, I’m in an excellent position to utilize the possibilities of modern technology use in government administration for Lilla Edets Municipality.

Before 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.

Could you elaborate on the trends you witness in public sector technologies and e-governance?

Data protection has become a massive topic of discussion in Europe today. 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 we put into the large-scale data clouds? How much and what data should we protect, whether personal or industry? Regarding how and what type of information we have within the municipal and government areas, we must be aware of specific data to protect at all costs. This is an extensive, ongoing discussion.

Meanwhile, we are seeing many changes in how many large-scale cloud providers try to find their way into managing and protecting data. On top of this, many of the local data privacy laws currently clash, creating a messy situation. It is challenging to determine how to approach this issue, where to invest, and what to focus on.

 We have to continue making the right choices on how we gather and store data and how we use the data in public clouds 

We are tackling this issue by trying to avoid putting ourselves in a difficult situation where there is an imbalance between data in the 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 store it in more local, regional data centers. This approach makes it possible to handle data privacy in a compliant manner.

How do public companies and government organizations find the right balance between gathering data for intelligent 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 a massive task for every stakeholder in the process, and everyone is trying their best to leverage their expertise in resolving the data privacy issues, including us.

The involvement of countless actors within the vast government administration space makes it quite challenging to keep track of the collection and usage of public data. As of today, we have come across many 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 appropriately using 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 have the technology to collect information on general data usage today, 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 not to make decisions yourself. This is necessary as the world has become incredibly complex today, which means there are multiple touchpoints when it comes to decision-making. It has become impossible for just one or a few people to make the right choices. My message for government and municipal bodies would be to invite domain experts and take the opportunity to gather and involve the right people with the right competence and expertise while making administrative decisions.