Moderator:

• Gabriel Trindade, Expansión Journalist

Panel:

• Michael Donaldson: Barcelona City Council CIO, CTO and Transparency and Public Governance
• Alex Novella: Catalunya Cybersecurity Agency SOC Manager
• Cristina Aranda Gutiérrez: Big Onion and Mujeres Tech co-founder
• Enrico Giannotti: CEDAT85 Managing Director
• Selena Gray: Speech -I Marketing Director

The objective of the roundtable has been to address the introduction of new technologies, both in companies and in public administration, to expose what the innovative solutions of AI and Big Data has meant and also the cybersecurity challenges that the use of these new technological applications.

In the words of Michael Donaldson, public administration and technological advancement are two concepts that fit together, and the fact that if the information and data are not shared and not endowed with transversality, they do not make any sense. On the other hand, the much-maligned bureaucracy guarantees transparency and traceability, while technological innovations are characterised by their dynamism, the paradox of new technologies is that they immediately cease to be so.

From the public administrations we cannot be oblivious to this revolution. We are dedicated to serving citizens and, for this, we have the obligation to use all the resources at our disposal: Big Data, AI… which have to serve as a component to improve the provision of our services, and we have to do it in the most proactive way possible.

When asked if there are many differences between introducing these new technologies in a private company or in a public authority, Cristina Aranda pointed out that everything progresses very quickly and can lead to training obsolescence in the public institutions, a situation that is not usually occur in the private sector. 80% of Artificial Intelligence projects stay in the drawer because there are no multidisciplinary teams to work from the beginning and then it is difficult to develop them. However, we are also experiencing an important part of public-private cooperation in this field, which is necessary and must be encouraged.

On the other hand, are companies and the public administration prepared to assume the entire amount of data that is handled with a level of security? According to Alex Novella, the panorama is very changing at the cybersecurity level. Threats arise every day in the different devices, in the different solutions, in the entire environment, so, at the Public Administration level, we are responding, not so much at the citizen level, but at the departmental level. The important thing is to try to identify where the sensitive information is, which requires qualified and committed analysts.

This global pandemic has brought digitalisation by leaps and bounds, which has involved the automation of many services that were not even considered before, and it has been done in a very positive way and with many advantages, however, that has led to the increase in the digital gap, which represents a new challenge for the society.

There is a coincidence that in this changing world it is very difficult to find talent, and resources to pay for it, the public sector has very strict economic limits.