Erika Piirmets of e-Estonia Briefing Centre among the protagonists of the Data Management Summit

We are revealing day by day all the professionals who will participate with their presentations at the most important event in Data Management. For the first time a forum tries to focus on Data Management in its entirety, from governance, through security, cloud, machine learning, data virtualization and much more.  Today we present Erika Piirmets who will be among the protagonists of the Italian edition of the Data Management Summit to be held on September 19 at SMI Technologies & Consulting in Rome and on October 25 in Bilbao.

Tell us a little about your background

Being 1,5 years in the office as the digital transformation adviser at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre, I am consulting governments and businesses internationally on digital transformation topics in the public sector. As the Government’s competence centre under Enterprise Estonia and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, the Briefing Centre is a digitalization hub in Tallinn designed specifically for experiencing the know-how in digitalisation e-Estonia has to offer.

Having worked previously as educator in Middle school, adult and non-formal education field, I emphasise the importance of upskilling and onboarding people in significant process changes. Digital transformation should be viewed as human centric and, in addition to providing technologies, also offer support.

I graduated with an Information Science degree and did my Masters in Organisational Behaviour, both in Tallinn, Estonia. After having lived in various European countries I use the cultural differences as a part of my everyday work to understand the needs of different societies and address them to offer the biggest gain for the citizens and decision-makers.

Tell us about the challenges your institution faces in the world of data management.

Estonia started its digitalisation journey already in the beginning of 1990s by digitising public services and adopting the government-issued electronic ID. Data management is the key challenge in this process – how much to collect the citizen’s data, where to store it and whom to give access to it, all the while avoid building data siloes. The solution for Estonia comes in the form of centralized data exchange software, the X-Road, implemented in the early 2000s. Although today put well in practice, it was a rocky start in the data management route. 

Now 20 years later, the main challenges include not collecting more data but how to automatically re-use the data the Government has already, how to move towards sustainable data management, how to avoid legacy systems and make more big data publicly available.

Do you think companies and institutions have the right culture to manage data?

Companies and public sector authorities must play by the rules set to them by policymakers. First task is to create a clear legislative space and clearly attribute roles and obligations. The lack of clear ownership results in chaos and processes being abandoned, in which case the end-user is often the party that suffers the consequences. On the other hand, I want to emphasize that over-regulation is not the answer to create the right culture – ownership and inclusion is. And ownership arises only when people believe in what they provide and feel the impact generated by their activity. In these circumstances people are also willing to take responsibility when something fails.

I believe the correct data management culture derives from a good working culture between people, and not solely from technological competences to build processes.

What are the most important challenges for CIOs, CDOs and CTOs in 2024?

Offer value and generate trust. Not whether you have built good server parks, implemented blockchain in your processes, mine massive amount of big data…

The majority of the population do not understand emerging technologies, and never have the interest to invest time to figure them out. Trust is the characteristic that will create divide between the newest technological breakthrough and the uptake and usage from the users in the long run.

We will be lucky enough to hear a speech from you: what will you talk about?

I will focus on data interoperability in Estonia using the X-Road to create a coherent society where public and private services are cross-using the same data sets and have a strong value proposition for the end-user, the citizen. In Estonia, we make the data run in system, not the person.

Why you can’t miss the Data Data Management Summit

DMS is an exclusive event to lead the data management community in the technology landscape, an open discussion forum to share experiences and use cases. An essential summit for CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, BI Managers, Data Governance Officers, Data Scientists who implement emerging technologies to solve new technological challenges. The event is held in different editions and in different countries. The Italian edition will be held on May 24 in Milan, on September 19 in Rome for public administration only and on October 25 and 26 in Bilbao for the Spanish edition.