Europe’s Digital Decade: Technology Industries of Finland Comments
Technology Industries of Finland welcomes the Commission initiative to create a compass for EU's Digital Decade. In order to achieve twin transition and unleash the potential of digital, we need new kind of leadership bot nationally and at the EU level. Commission should take building of robust soft insfrastructure for data as a guiding Pole Star.
Technology Industries of Finland sees that being able to provide the twin transition throughout the society is a must-win battle for the EU. It is also a key challenge for Europe to put its values into action.
This poses a leadership challenge: digital solutions provide important pieces of shared soft infrastructure that give us the ability to have right data at the right place, to be able to use our – both persons’ and organisations’ – electronic identities on a trustworthy manner and give access to our data to the ones we choose to trust. It is not worthwhile to develop these solutions separately for private and public sectors. EU must aim for shared, flexible and intelligent solutions, stemming from the needs people and businesses – as visualised in attached picture. To facilitate this, we need to rethink leadership in digital domain, a new political approach to possibilities of digital, both at the EU and national level.
European industries play a key role in making the twin transition reality. European industry also plays a key role in keeping this continent competitive and prosperous. We need a good dialogue, both in setting the targets and monitoring progress. Digital has a sizeable role to play in diminishing administrative burden and putting data into use to serve people and businesses. ‘Ask only once’ is a good principle to build upon, followed by APIs and other means of efficient data management.
Cutting unnecessary administrative and regulatory burden and providing support for digitalization of SMEs are likely to be major foundations for keeping our industries at the forefront. Setting clear goals and building systematically European trustworthy and modular soft infrastructure for data and monitoring the development are the right steps to the future that is both green and digital.
