The government's long-awaited national data strategy shows great need

Today, the government presented a national data strategy, which is welcomed by TechSverige. The strategy aims to increase access to data and thereby strengthen Sweden's competitiveness by better utilizing digital data assets. The goal is for Sweden to be a leading data-sharing nation in AI and digital innovation to strengthen welfare, Swedish competitiveness and contribute to a sustainable society.

- "The fact that the government has finally decided on a data strategy is welcome. However, the strategy mainly describes measures already taken and less about important prerequisites for the strategy to succeed in practice," says Fredrik Sand, industry policy expert at TechSverige.

The business perspective is missing

Fredrik Sand says that new ambitious measures and strategic initiatives that could really lead to the goals that the government says it is striving for are conspicuous by their absence.

- Areas that need to be highlighted include skills supply, intellectual property rights and the need for more radical changes in how authorities relate to open data. The entrepreneurial perspective is also largely missing.

Data a prerequisite for competitiveness

The data strategy's talk of "controlled sharing" of data could be used by public authorities to simply keep data for themselves, according to Fredrik Sand. At the same time, he points out that it is fundamentally welcome that the government is now talking about data as an important prerequisite for competitiveness and innovation - even if it is sometimes in a roundabout way.

- The data strategy is ambitious in some respects, but it also shows that the area has been neglected. The strategy must be translated into action, and urgently. More space data is of course good, but there is still a lot of work to be done with the government's ground services," concludes Fredrik Sand.