Interview with Alberto Palomo-Lozano, Chief Data Officer of the Spanish Government: "It is important to have a common governance that allows data sharing"

Just a few days ago, Alberto Palomo-Lozano, Chief Data Officer of the Spanish Government, participated in Cibercotizante, one of Capital Radio's most followed technology programmes. Throughout the almost thirty minutes of the interview, Palomo-Lozano gives a succinct assessment of his first 10 months at the head of the Data Office and underlines the importance of the Office as part of the gear and mission of the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence.

"It has been a period of creation and coordination (to) promote the Data Culture and the Data Economy", he points out, adding that the Data Office "was not created to invent technology, but to articulate innovation capacity around data".

In fact, according to Palomo-Lozano himself, the strategy to be followed arises from the European Data Strategy, which is focused on harnessing the full potential of data, and consists of 4 pillars: legal reference framework for data access and use, technological enablers and infrastructures, empowerment and training, and common European sectoral data spaces.

Several different but complementary strategic lines are pursued:

• Identification of re-usable data sources.
• Characterising other data sources that can be made available (under the necessary conditions of security and confidentiality).
• Elaborate general guidelines for data governance, management and data quality.
• Study the dimensions of data sharing and exploitation:

- Business models

- Regulatory framework

- Functionalities for carrying out sharing

- Data sharing and exploitation aspects (quality, modelling, value chain, ...)

- Considerations for operational sustainability

- Purpose issues

- Technologies for shaping national data spaces

The weight of the Autonomous Communities and the importance of common governance

In terms of Public Administration data, these plans and strategies cannot be understood without taking into account the role played by the Autonomous Communities in terms of coordination and data sharing: "We are looking for synergies and meeting points between the activities carried out by the territorial administrations and the General State Administration”. The experience of these territorial administrations is fundamental to gain capillarity in the development of data spaces. However, "it is also important to have a series of common rules and commitments, precisely to overcome barriers and reluctance to share and exploit data, which is a non-rivalrous resource; in other words, it is not wasted when used and can be used in several areas at the same time", adds Alberto Palomo-Lozano.

Almost in parallel, and so that all listeners can understand the challenges and opportunities faced by a role such as his, the Chief Data Officer of the Spanish Government explains the role played by his international counterparts in the digital society. Thus, while countries such as Canada or the United States have similar roles at the national level, these "have not had a transversal structure, they have been CDOs in (vertical and specific) departments". In the UK or France the figure "has dedicated (horizontal) functions", aligned with national data strategies and "the improvement of public service thanks to digital technology (...) based on exploiting government data, AI, open source, ...".

In line with this idea, Alberto Palomo-Lozano argues that the Spanish Data Office has a slightly different role than the previous ones: "The approach in Spain combines the internal with the external. On the one hand, it is similar to what France does with respect to government data (generating frameworks for sharing and exploiting data to improve public service, opening them up to implement transparency actions, data-driven policies) and - in turn - also supporting and coordinating the efforts of society; promoting the exploitation of industrial data, (as well as) developing infrastructures and digital sovereignty that guarantees (this capacity to extract value)". In other words, work is being done in two complementary directions, because "we have to set an example from within, and also because government data has an impact on the Society and the industrial data initiatives themselves", he adds.

Finally, and with regard to the role played by our country in the data strategy at European level, Palomo-Lozano is enthusiastic and grateful for the trust that the Governmental Advisory Board of Gaia-X has placed in Spain, which holds the Presidency of the council that will advise the European entity when its activities intersect with the public policies and strategies of the member states. The interrelationship is broad, because "although Gaia-X is a private initiative, it has a strong public impetus because it is aligned with the European Data Strategy".

"Gaia-X is a three-legged initiative. On the one hand, there is the European non-profit association, which aims to generate specifications for data architecture and data services. Then there is the development community, which creates the Federated Data Services consisting of four blocks or families: identity and trust, federated catalogue, sovereign data exchange and compliance. Finally, the third leg is the national hubs, where market development takes place. In other words, regional organisations use the developed framework to create data services that are then used in projects and applications", says the Spanish government's Chief Data Officer. Data projects that - for the tourism sector - will be addressed at an event on 9 June.

However, according to his words on Capital Radio, Spain not only stands out internationally thanks to initiatives such as Gaia-X, but has also begun to emerge as a pole of attraction for large DPCs (Data Processing Centres) from different parts of the world. Palomo-Lozano believes that this is mainly due to reasons such as:

• The international connectivity of the Iberian Peninsula through submarine cables. It is also a gateway from continental Europe to Latin America, and therefore also a wide range of cloud offerings in Spanish.
• The existence of powerful cloud facilities located in Spain, which makes us count on human talent with knowledge and experience. Some of them: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM or Oracle.
• A large part of the data traffic is produced within the data centres themselves, and between data centres. In other words, economies of scale are generated proportionally to the presence of other data centres.

If you are interested in knowing in depth the vision of the Data Office, you can listen to the full interview on Capital Radio by clicking on the following link.