Pierrakakis: The wooden walls of the era are digital walls

“The wooden walls of the era are digital walls and I think at the end of the day they are things that we have to invest in, we can invest in, we have the people, we have the capabilities, we have the strategy and what was basically missing was the belief that we can achieve it. And I think we proved that we can” pointed out Minister of Digital Governance, Kyriakos Pierrakakis in his address at the 1st Naoussa development conference last night, Saturday 15 October.

He underlined that “digital transformation is a catalyst and I would say that it has both a horizontal dimension of problem solving and a dual dimension of social cohesion and economic development” and referred extensively to the operation and the initiatives and actions of the ministry so far, which is focused on citizen. “Using simple technologies you change the procedures of the state, but in order to be able to do this, someone had to be able to connect the various registers together” and he added: “Starting with this philosophy to simplify procedures, to make it easier interaction, to redesign the state, we thought that basically we want to do a basic reform of gov.gr”.

The minister spoke of “trust towards the state which if one saw studies in the past decades concerning our country, all these studies underlined and demonstrated that Greece is very low in what we would describe as social capital”, while he also underlined the economic dimensions, such as the telecommunications sector. “In less than five years, we will have covered the entire country with optical fiber and to this will be added the microsatellites, which will also play a decisive role and cover a large part of the connectivity. “Greece has already allowed Starlink to broadcast, in Northern Greece it even has a very good signal, and Amazon will soon join in providing telecommunication services as well.”

Mr. Pierrakakis focused in the great role and importance of investments that have been made by Microsoft, Amazon and Google “as a presumption of the vote of confidence that is actually given to the country by many other countries and by big business. And I will say that here, in addition to the strategy structured by the government in the area of ​​investments, there was also something very targeted: a law called the Cloud First Policy which gave birth, rather symbolized such ambition in relation to the country’s digital transformation program that is, that the entire Greek Government will switch to what we call the Cloud where all three major Cloud providers Microsoft, Amazon and Google have judged that Greece is really starting to differentiate itself from the rest of the European Union in this area and they decided to make all three investments in our country in a Data Center on it. This in itself shows that sometimes it is enough to think intelligently not only at the level of spending money or making targeted investments or building applications but to take advantage of the legislation and the incentives it gives and the signal it sometimes gives to can really create a very positive climate for investment to take place.” The minister did not fail to talk about digital education “because it is really a space that can provide a lot of help, help to those who participate in it and as a result to all the rest”.

Speaking about the crises in recent years noted that “the last twenty years are twenty years of crises, more broadly. Starting with the events of September 11, 2001, then with the financial crisis of 2008-2009, how it culminated in our case in the Eurozone debt crisis in 2010 with Greece signing the Memorandum. How we got into a crisis of about ten years, a little less than ten years, it was a decade of very great economic difficulties for our country. And it is very interesting how this particular crisis was experienced and metabolised in a completely different way from country to country. To make the health analogy, one would say that some countries experienced it as a light-medium cold, Greece experienced it as a long covid, the issue of the economic crisis”. Continuing, he emphasized that “in 2019, slowly coming out of this very difficult situation, we were faced with a sequence of new crises: on the one hand, that of covid-19, at the international level we had and of course we have the war in Ukraine, we have the energy crisis, we have inflation, in Greece we have the additional crisis in Greek-Turkish relations, the hybrid crisis on the Evros and the islands. And I think all of this shows how the concept of crisis with a capital K constitutes a new normality and delimits the role of governments in a period when the density of these events is increasing. That is, how can you structure mechanisms and groups that can respond and deal with extraordinary events, those that one would say that not only do you know that you don’t know, but even those that you don’t know that you don’t know when they arise.”

The minister talked about the successful management of each crisis during the last three years, since as he said “we managed to succeed not only by managing these crises to a very large extent but at the same time by resolving outstanding issues of the past which should have been resolved five, ten, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago. Thus highlighting a dual role for the state: that on the one hand Greece had to solve issues of reforms that had not been done for many years and on the other hand it had to respond to all these emerging challenges that were in front of it”. As he pointed out, “Greece is finding a pace corresponding to that which we have been saying for years that it deserves”.

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