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Spain in the data-sphere
Every day more than 5 billion people, over 60% of the world's population, access the internet creating, exchanging and consuming huge amounts of data.
According to official sources, 42.5 million Spaniards between 16 and 74 years of age, eight out of ten of whom have contacted or interacted digitally with public administrations in the last 12 months.
The incorporation of human activities into this digital environment, which since the 1980s has come to be known as the "data-sphere" or "digital sphere", goes far beyond mere technological change. It sustains and nourishes digital life, interpersonal and mass communication, leisure, work, knowledge of all kinds, productive activities and commerce and the provision of services, both in the private and public sector.
Data-Sphere: the set of all information in digital spaces (...) a complete, highly interconnected and complex digital ecosystem (...) that we inhabit and that affects the way we live our lives". Diccionario de Conceptos y Términos de la Administración Electrónica, Gobierno de España, 2023
Hence, digitalisation is referred to as the "Fourth Industrial Revolution"- as it was called by the World Economic Forum in 2016-, a process that has accelerated with the pandemic. The European Union has set out a series of guidelines and objectives to be achieved by 2030 to achieve the full digitalisation of member countries, in a plan called the "Digital Decade".
Along these lines, the Spanish government launched an ambitious Digital Agenda in 2020, with a five-year horizon, for which it is counting on Ineco, which has been involved for years in the digitalisation of justice, employment and healthcare.
A data world
Image: Ineco Archive
The term "data-sphere" was developed by analogy with the physical structure of the Earth, consisting of the lithosphere or land surface, the hydrosphere (bodies of water) and the atmosphere (air).
Data are the molecules that make up this digital ecosystem, an immense volume of information that continues to grow at a dizzying pace. According to Telefónica, worldwide data traffic has increased 27-fold over the last 10 years, and the most recent estimates suggest that by 2025 it will exceed 180 zettabytes of information worldwide, an astronomical figure that is equivalent to 180 times all the information generated in the world in 2011.
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Future plans
The Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (RRTP) devotes almost a third of its resources from the Next Generation EU Recovery Mechanism to boosting the digital transformation of the country's economy and public Administration.
To this end, eight major action programmes have been launched at national level, with specific measures to implement the Digital Agenda 2026, focusing on key aspects: digital infrastructures, 5G, digital skills, cybersecurity, digitalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises, Spain Audiovisual Hub of Europe, National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Plan for the Digitalisation of Spain’s Public Administration 2021-2025, launched in 2021, also with the support of Ineco.
Ineco, which has been involved in major digitalisation projects in areas such as justice, employment and healthcare for almost a decade, received a new commission at the end of 2023 to carry out various tasks related to the Public Administration Digitalisation Plan, together with another major project: support for the creation of a national health data space or health data lake.
At the end of 2023, the company received a new order to execute different works related to the Plan, together with another major project: the creation of a national health data lake, in collaboration with the SGAD, the General Directorate of Data and the Ministry of Health. The Digitalisation Plan includes 17 measures with the aim of "improving the efficiency of public administrations as a whole, guaranteeing the sustainability of investments through the reinforcement and reuse of shared resources and services". The provider of these common services to all levels of administration (local, regional and national) is the SGAD, the General Secretariat for Digital Administration, which reports to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service, for which Ineco has been working for almost a decade.
These shared services include digital identification systems (Cl@ve, @Firma), platforms such as ACCEDA (citizen access to government files) and GEISER (electronic registry).
Also, high security applications and networks, information services 060, Cita Previa or Carpeta Ciudadana.
In addition, the company also provides the SGAD with technical support in the field of telecommunications (networks, data, voice, mobility, security, etc...) and operates a project office which is responsible for deploying and reviewing the performance of technical solutions.
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Facing the second Transition
Between 1975 and 1981, the arrival of democracy took place in Spain, the result of a period known as "Transition". One of the key milestones was the drafting of the current Constitution, approved by consensus among all political groups in 1978. It was one of the first in the world to make reference to what was then still an incipient reality, information technology: "The law shall limit the use of information technology in order to guarantee the honour and personal and family privacy of citizens and the full exercise of their rights" (Article 18, section 4).
More than four decades after the drafting of this paragraph, technological advances have taken the challenge of protecting citizens' right to privacy and confidentiality to a new level. Cybersecurity, which the National Security Scheme describes as "the ability of networks and information systems to withstand (...), any action that compromises the availability, authenticity, integrity or confidentiality of data (...) or the services offered (...) or accessible through them”, is one of the great challenges of the digital age, where ethical, legal and technological aspects converge.
One of Ineco's outstanding tasks for the SGAD is, indeed, the support in the deployment of the Cybersecurity Operations Centre of the General State Administration and its public bodies, the process of certification of compliance with the National Security Scheme (ENS), as well as the development of the security policy and technical evaluation of the services provided by the SGAD.
In this area, it can be said that size doesn´t matter: small towns and local authorities are also susceptible to cyber-attacks. Ineco also provides technical support to local councils with less than 50,000 inhabitants, through the implementation of services and a single, centralised Cybersecurity Operations Centre to govern, coordinate and operate the services implemented.
The digital transformation of the public sector, together with that of companies, is creating a panorama that, due to the great significance of the changes it entails, can be considered the "second Transition" in the country's recent history.
These computerised defences are the modern equivalent of the ancient walls that surrounded many towns, both large and small., another threat of a very different nature is looming over many of the latter: depopulation, a consequence of the increasing concentration of inhabitants in urban areas.
It is one of the causes of the "digital divide", i.e. deficiencies or gaps in access to the digital sphere for individuals or groups, due to geographical, socio-economic, etc. factors. Bridging them is another of the great contemporary challenges.
In this sense, the Spanish Magna Carta enshrines the equality of citizens before the law, and furthermore assumes the commitment to "facilitate the participation of all citizens in political, economic, cultural and social life" (Article 9, paragraph 2).
As part of one of the The General Secretariat of Digital Administration`s assignments (SGAD), this line of work includes Ineco's work aimed at facilitating users' access to public services. These include the "App Factory" for the development of applications that will make it possible for half of all public services to be available on mobile phones by the end of 2025.
Also, the rationalisation of web portals to improve the user experience for citizens, the "Administración en un click", which modernises notifications and registration systems, electronic invoicing and document management and the deployment of infrastructure for the multichannel 060 citizen service.
With regard to the internal procedures of the administration, Ineco is working on solutions to digitalise contracting files, the transparent management and exchange of data, with the aim of equipping the entire administration with capacities related to the exploitation of information using advanced analytical techniques (deep learning and machine learning), the adoption of cloud technologies and the development of the "smart workplace" for public employees.
A total of eleven lines of work related to the 17 measures included in the Public Administrations Digitalisation Plan are being developed. Nine of these measures are of a cross-cutting nature, six for "the transformation of the sectors with the greatest impact" (health, justice, employment, inclusion, social security and migration and consular services) and two are aimed at modernising the central services of the General State Administration and supporting the transformation of the territorial administrations.
The digital transformation of the public sector, together with that of companies, is creating a panorama that, due to the enormous significance of the changes it entails, can be considered the "second Transition" in the country's recent history.
The digitised digitiser
Photo: Elvira Gómez Vila
At the end of the 19th century, in response to the social and economic changes of the first Industrial Revolution, the concept of the "social state" emerged. That is to say, one in which the state moves from playing a passive role as the holder and manager of public goods to actively intervening as an agent of social change. It does this by starting to provide services such as basic education, health care and benefits for sickness, retirement, unemployment, etc. financed through taxation.
At the same time, the relationship between the State and the citizen is also evolving, moving from the traditional "administrator-administered" binomial to the more recent consideration of the user of public services as a "client" of the Administration. As a result, it is committed to improving the quality of the public services it provides. In this context, the ongoing digitalisation process is not limited to a mere technological change, but goes much further, and is seen as a historic opportunity for modernisation and improvement.
Thus, the Spanish administration, like its European counterparts, has assumed a dual role as both a recipient and a driver of this change. In other words, it promotes it in society and the economy while at the same time modernising and digitalising itself.
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The lake in the cloud
In the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, "Health is not everything, but without health, everything is nothing". The global pandemic of COVID 19 highlighted this reality, also underlining "dramatically", as stated in the Spanish Digital Health Strategy, "the importance of having accurate, complete and reliable information, practically immediately, in order to make decisions".
Hence, one of the three pillars of the Strategy is the promotion of health data analytics, for which it proposes, among other actions, the creation of a "National Health Data Space" that will be used for "public health surveillance, clinical practice, service evaluation and research".
Advanced digital technologies such as big data, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to transform the healthcare system. Digital Health Strategy of the National Health System, Ministry of Health, Spain, 2021
The project was launched in 2023 and the bodies responsible are the General Secretariat for Digital Administration (SGAD), supported by Ineco, the General Directorate of Data and the State Secretariat for the Digitalisation of Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA), in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. The initiative will involve a cloud-based data platform, akin to a data lake, where the Ministry of Health and regional governments along with other stakeholders in the National Health System such as healthcare and research centres, official health agencies, scientific societies, and professionals can share and access information. In the future, it aims to be interoperable with the European Data Space.
A data lake is a secure and massive storage system in the cloud for raw, unprocessed data in any format and of any type, whether structured (databases), unstructured (emails, PDFs, text documents), binary (images, videos, audio) or semi-structured (CSV files, XML, etc.). This has advantages over data warehouses, such as lower costs, as the data is stored without pre-processing, and greater flexibility, as it is useful for many different purposes. In addition, they are particularly suitable for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In 2010, Pentaho executive and founder Peter Dixon explained the concept by comparing a data mart to bottled, purified, packaged and ready-to-drink water, whereas a data lake is "a large body of water in its natural state", with which users can interact in different ways: "examine it, dive into it or take samples".
In the Spanish health data lake, three general areas have been identified for use cases: data analytics for public health policies, drug safety surveillance and in-depth knowledge of diseases. In 2023, the development of two use cases was initiated to test the system: one on antibiotic use in the National Health System, and the other on predicting decompensation in chronic diseases (COPD and HF).
The National Health Data Space proposes a centralised data governance, with common standards, norms, roles and tools, which can be accessed by the autonomous communities, which have their own systems, and guaranteeing connectivity, quality and security at all times.
The architecture is structured in two types of nodes: autonomous and central. In the former, there is an anonymised, centralised and virtual catalogue of data for each Autonomous Community, while the central node provides access to the autonomous ones, as well as allowing analysis and cross-checking, with advanced computing and storage capacity.
In the future, and not exclusively, it could also be the access node to the European Health Data Space.
As for access to data, it is direct in the case of the autonomous communities in their own health areas. For studies requiring data from several communities, national bodies or the European Union (with prior approval of the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System), access will be through the central node.
