The Government appoints its first Chief Data Officer to deploy the Data Office in Spain within the framework of the Recovery Plan

The Government has appointed Alberto Palomo Lozano as the first Chief Data Officer of Spain, who will be responsible for launching the Data Office, under the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.

Alberto Palomo holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid, a Certificate in Management, Technology and Innovation from MIT, and a training course in Data Mining and Statistical Learning from UNED, among other courses.

On a professional level, the new Chief Data Officer is an expert in Data Analytics and the definition of data strategies, with a long experience managing teams of data scientists to generate efficiencies in business processes.

He highlights his experience in a Deep Learning R&D laboratory for Huawei Canada, where he worked on hardware design to optimize the training phase of neural networks based on Artificial Intelligence. His profile will be key to establishing a clear governance of the data ecosystem in Spain, where the public sector and the private sector can collaborate in confidence to deploy the Spanish data economy.

The Data Office is the competent body in the field of data governance for the development of a true data economy in a transversal way. Its aim is to establish horizontal principles and standards to ensure that data flows across sectors, ensuring privacy and respect for citizens’ rights at all times.

The Data Office has the task of responding to the main challenges that exist today in the data economy, defining the legal and political frameworks for data sharing and governance. This agency was created with the aim of becoming a key agent to promote a framework that guarantees data sovereignty in Spain and at European level, promoting the construction of data centers, as well as the processing and storage of such data in Spain. It will also focus on measures for the sharing and use of public and private data, the promotion of sectoral data spaces, and the establishment of governance mechanisms.

In particular, the functions of the Data Office include the design of data management strategies and reference frameworks, the creation of data sharing spaces between companies, citizens and Public Administrations in a secure manner and with governance and the massive use of data in the productive sectors of the economy through Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technologies.

Likewise, it is responsible for the development of secure access mechanisms to these data platforms for evidence-based public decision-making, the design of governance policies and standards in the management and analysis of data that should govern the General Administration of the State, the development of a Competence Center for advanced data analytics and the formation and development of mechanisms of knowledge transfer to the different ministries and Public Administrations.

At all times, the agency will guarantee and promote the responsible and sustainable use of data, analyzing and identifying those technologies that ensure an ethical processing of data.

The implementation of the Data Office is one of the measures included in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and in the strategy Spain Digital 2025, as one of the key elements for the promotion and strengthening of the data economy.

The Data Office will also promote the implementation of the data sharing architecture developed within GAIS-X as well as relations with the industry in data sharing and cloud services. Together with the regional hub of GAIS-X in Spain, the Data Office will support the deployment of sectoral data spaces, with special emphasis on the tourism, health, agri-food or sustainable mobility sector.

Until the next 23rd of July, the expression of interest for the promotion of the Spanish GAIS-X hub.