Jakarta. Having government agencies share their data with one another in a secure manner can help Indonesia better serve its citizens, according to the top brass of a data cloud platform.

Government agencies today are working in silos. Indonesia also sees its data scattered across different government agencies and ministries. 

“Most government agencies are working independently. They are trying to serve the same consumer or citizens through different services,” Sanjay Deshmukh, the senior regional vice president for the ASEAN and India region at data cloud firm Snowflake, told the Jakarta Globe in a recent media interview.

“If government agencies collaborate and share data in a very secure manner, they will be able to get a better understanding of how to serve the citizens,” Deshmukh said.

Snowflake’s technology enables organizations to break down data silos and distribute data across ecosystems, among others.

Snowflake recently announced its partnership with cloud computing platform Amazon Web Series (AWS) Asia-Pacific (Jakarta) region, marking the former’s entry into the Indonesian market. 

Deshmukh said cloud data collaboration solution could become a low-hanging fruit for Snowflake’s business within Indonesia’s government sector. He added that the Indonesian government could also use Snowflake’s technology as a data platform to help individual departments become more data-driven in policymaking and budget allocation.

“[By becoming data-driven], government agencies will spend the money in a more judicious manner. In other words, they will only spend them in areas that are actually helping the citizens,” Deshmukh said. 

When asked if Snowflake had begun talks with the government on cloud data collaboration, Deshmukh said the company would leverage its partnership with AWS to start the conversation. 

“We want to meet the requirements of data sovereignty before we engage in the discussions. We will leverage our partnership with AWS to collaborate with the Indonesian government agencies, and talk to them about this concept of data collaboration and how they can better serve the citizens,” Deshmukh said.

The Indonesian government is increasingly recognizing the importance of data-driven policymaking.

Late last year, the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) launched Satu Data Indonesia, a data portal that stores all government data in one single repository. At the launch, National Development Minister Suharso Monoarfa revealed that many government agencies were too possessive of their data, and were reluctant to share them.

“This is one of the non-technical challenges that we have to face. Our ego-sectoral tendencies are too big. Oftentimes, it is not about ‘data ownership’, but ‘data possessiveness’,” Suharso said.