A timely and very practical book from a group of experts in the fields of technology policy, digital transformation and the building of large public technology services. Full of relevant case studies across a range of technology types with lessons learned from bitter experience, I would recommend this book to anyone tasked with managing digital sovereignty initiatives or leaders simply wanting to know what questions they need to be asking.
Every day seems to bring another scare story about the dangers of AI, security issues with our technology service providers and our over-reliance on a handful of massive, largely US-owned hyperscalers. Add to this an increasingly unstable American administration that seems hostile to Europe and a more aggressive Russian regime and we have cause to wonder whether the allies, technologies and services we have come to depend on can be trusted any more. Hence a growing realisation that questions of sovereignty no longer just relate to geographic borders. The underpinning technologies that power our public and private sectors could be switched off or degraded on the whim of an authoritarian regime or autocratic chief executive (not mentioning any names).
So what can we as individuals, employees or leaders do about this? How should we think about these issues in terms of national security, organisational resilience and our ability to determine our own futures?
Well as the authors of Digital Sovereignty point out, the answer is not to pull up the drawbridge and aim for self-sufficiency for our technological needs. That is neither practical nor necessary. The first step is to better understand our current situation with respect to the technologies we currently use (organisationally and nationally), who controls them, where the underpinning infrastructure resides and the governance that dictates how we use them – the authors call this “situational awareness”. This involves leaders asking questions around how easy it would be to exit their current services in the next 12 months, can they explain their current digital architecture without calling in help from vendors, who within the organisation has the knowledge to manage these complex relationships and is there a plan if radical changes are made to current pricing, jurisdiction and ownership of the current infrastructure.
The authors point out that the situation any organisation finds itself in terms of digital architecture, vendor dependencies and being locked into proprietary standards are the accumulation of years of small decisions:
“This rarely happens in a single moment.
The power to decide fades over the years through an accumulation of choices that each made sense at the time. A contract signed because it was the easiest thing to do in that moment. A system adopted because there was no budget or time to explore alternatives. Each decision was reasonable when it was made, but now they add up to something that nobody would choose.”
The book’s case studies highlight where things can go wrong when unintended consequences flow from policy decisions. The UK’s G-Cloud initiative launched in 2012 to encourage public technology contracts to go to UK-based suppliers worked well for several years as it required bidders for government data contracts to store data in-country. At the time, the hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Google) did not have data centres in the UK so contracts went to local SMEs. By the end of 2013, more than half of G-Cloud spending was going to SMEs. However, very quickly the US giants started building data infrastructure in the UK and by the end of 2018 the share of spend going to UK SMEs had fallen to 8% from 13% several years previously. Similarly, the EU’s Gaia-X initiative which sought to develop European infrastructure as an alternative to US hyperscalers did not achieve its aims through lack of clarity as to details and the inclusion of AWS, Microsoft, Google and other giants into the project. This, rather obviously, undermined the primary purpose of the initiative.
It is easy to despair of the current situation in the UK and Europe as well as much of the rest of the world outside of China and the US. However, the authors paint a generally positive picture of what we can realistically do about our dependency on foreign technology. Building our own technology stacks from the ground up is not an option – as the book outlines. For example, the raw materials that go into making the silicon for the chips as well as the foundries which make the chips cannot be sourced and replicated in any single country. The expertise as well as the infrastructure for all this resides in a number of countries from Taiwan to the Netherlands. The answer is to first understand where our dependencies are, what alternatives exist and plan around that. Open-source software and open weight AI models as well as open protocols and standards are a big part of weaning ourselves off the platforms of a few companies and to securing independence and flexibility.
The decisions we make today will inform our tomorrows and making those decisions from a more informed position will better secure our future. This book is a good starting point for anyone setting out on that journey.
Buy it here ( I do not receive any commissions from this) – https://londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk/books/digital-sovereignty-the-power-to-decide/
Dr Martin De Saulles is an author and technology analyst. He has written multiple books on the information economy, innovation, AI and digital sovereignty and is a contributing writer at CIO.com. He is a regular speaker at technology events and conferences.