Digital Sovereignty refers to the ability of individuals, businesses and government to freely choose how they implement the digital transformation and their priorities in doing so.
Many governments find their financial and human resources are under new and increasing pressures from changing demands and an aging and diverse population. Some governments, particularly in cities, are experiencing unprecedented growth in population as people migrate to find new and better opportunities for jobs, health, and education. These challenges of delivery are compounded by citizens demanding better, more accessible engagement with governments at every level with their expectations being fueled by the commercial sector experiences and social media.
While governments have been seeking solutions to these challenges, some have been taking advantage of the rapid advances in cloud and mobile computing, big data, and analytics, to begin to change the face of their government. These forward-thinking agencies are looking to leave behind old manual legacy processes, disparate systems, and paper-based methods. They are working towards a digital future enabled by technology as the catalyst for new business and government models, services, and citizen experiences.
One important question here is how do we setup the control over the what is important to us? Where do we draw the boundaries of control and how do we implement it?
Digital Sovereignty Options : Infrastructure Control vs. Data Control
Digital infrastructures are always bounded by the two extremes: strong regulatory or ownership control where Government or Government related agency runs the firm infrastructure play keeping the infrastructure services closely regulated versus soft control where Government leaves the development of those infrastructure services to the market.
Data control is also defined in a range from strong regulation by the Government addressing different topics like ownership, usage, privacy to weak regulation where most of the data governance is left to the private market with no Government regulation (or very little of).
Finding the balance is important task for any Government: too much of regulation can lead to the lack of innovation. Too little of regulation and that leads to different data concerns, like security, transparency, and privacy.
Figure 1 Digital Infrastructure vs Data Control, adapted from EIT Digital Sovereignty Report 2020 (find it here)
Now, before we dive into the idea here, I am just for the references, keeping the original names of scenarios, not implying anything about the nature of the Government 🙂
- SCENARIO 1 – ULTRA-LIBERAL: few policies are in place; regulators do not have a strong impact and there is a significant room for private business to work with the data. Creating new scenarios are strongly connected to new business opportunities. New developments are left to co-regulation, self-regulation, and standardization, where Government have a supportive role. Economic growth is mainly business driven but Government have a role in driving innovative infrastructure where there is a lack of short-term financial resources or returns.
- SCENARIO 2 – DYSTOPIAN: Government controls the infrastructure but does not have control over the data. Businesses that provide infrastructure face strong Government regulation and intervention. Governments run innovative projects with set of trusted infrastructure providers. Data is not that controlled but given that it runs over the controlled infrastructure, and too much control will lead to lack of innovation.
- SCENARIO 3 – ULTRA-SOCIAL: Government have a strong control over the infrastructure with strong control over the data. Regulators play an important role with strong data protection regulation. Business that provides infrastructure are impacted by the government intervention via regulator, same as with data driven services. This scenario usually leads to public private partnerships for higher level infrastructure layers like clouds and platforms.
- SCNEARIO 4 – UTOPIAN: Government does not enforce strict control over the infrastructure, but it still drives strong data protection. Business that delivers infrastructure have a significant impact; government interest is safeguarded by the regulator. Economic growth is driven by technology investments by businesses via ecosystems that bring together businesses, innovators, entrepreneurs, and early adopters. Data is still strongly controlled and regulated.
Control vs. Objectives
Different scenarios have a different impact on the potential digital sovereignty policy objectives that Government could have. Here, we are looking at the five most common ones: impact on growth, innovation, trust, capabilities, and fairness of the specific scenario.
The scenarios contain a qualitative assessment of their likely impact on the five policy objectives: economic growth, innovation, trust (i.e. from the user perspective), level playing field or capabilities built (i.e. from the supplier perspective) and fairness (i.e. equitable access to economic opportunity).
Assessment run by EIT shows that the ultra-social and utopian scenarios are very similar and deliver the most balanced overall result. The ultra-social scenario delivers somewhat better on fairness and capabilities due to the strong role of the regulator in that scenario.
Figure 2 Digital Sovereignty options and created value for different development objectives.
Looking at the most productive options for potential policy objectives, recommendation is to focus on a two that will enable the variety of infrastructure options and keep the strong control over the data sovereignty: (3) ULTRA-SOCIAL scenario and (4) UTOPIAN scenario. Scenarios 1 and Scenario 2 do not contribute to fairness and trust – which have a strong impact on innovation and growth.
Further research on how to enable those two options is giving us following view:
(3) ULTRA-SOCIAL
- Infrastructure: firm Government control. Here, Governments are investing in their own local datacenters (or hosting or G-Cloud infrastructure) and wants to keep all infrastructure capabilities under their own control. For the infrastructure that is under their control, they are willing to combine both public and private infrastructure into the hybrid mode. Governments are looking at the cloud computing capabilities but have a strong requirement to locate those in their own controlled infrastructure.
- Data: strong Government control. Here, Governments require strong control over the data that belongs to the Government or organizations or individuals. Governments are ready to publish the non-classified, non-personal data through the Open Data model, but wants to have good data governance and data classification on the data. Personal data is strongly regulated and controlled by different policies.
(4) UTOPIAN
- Infrastructure: soft Government control. Here, Governments are investing in their own datacenters (or hosting or G-Cloud infrastructure) but is willing to extend that infrastructure with the hybrid and public cloud for most of the common, low risk scenarios. Governments are looking at the cloud computing capabilities from the public cloud and do not require to locate those capabilities in their own controlled infrastructure.
- Data: strong Government control. Here, Governments require strong control over the data that belongs to the Government or organizations or individuals. Governments are ready to publish the non-classified, non-personal data through the Open Data model, but wants to have good data governance and data classification on the data. Personal data is strongly regulated and controlled by different policies.
What does that mean for us? Looks like that if Governments keep the right level of control over the data in their sovereignty efforts, infrastructure itself (location for particular) is not that important. And that is good direction: security, control, monitoring and compliance are software tools, not locations with dogs and wires.
But that is new story, for the next post.