This week, Digital Nation’s arsenal of expertise is getting yet another massive boost - Maksim Ovtsinnikov is joining Digital Nation’s team as our Director of Interoperability.

Maksim previously held the position of Head of Data Exchange Technologies at Cybernetica and his 8 years of experience in the e-Governance domain has made him truly grasp the intricacies of different nations' problems to find long-lasting solutions. Between 2017 and 2021, Maksim has been in charge of the technical track of Ukrainian Trembita data exchange platform, which is the country’s digital backbone for e-governance and e-services and which empowers the famous Diia application. Besides Ukraine, Maksim has been working with the governments of Benin, Malaysia, Brazil, Tunisia, Namibia, Aruba, Kenya and many others, helping these countries to digitalize their public services.

We asked Maksim to give you insights into the most recent trends in interoperability and data exchanges that he is seeing across the globe:
1. There is a shift from monolithic systems to modular and reusable digital building blocks. This initiative is being driven by GovStack and promotes vendor neutrality and open standards, something which Digital Nation wholeheartedly supports.
2. Governments have been pushing for event-driven architecture and cloud-ready interoperability platforms as it fits well into cloud-first strategy.
3. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are offering new ways of solving problems in the interoperability domain. Be it data mapping, matching citizen's records across different databases in case of the absence of a unique identifier, harmonization of the workflows or processes inside the interoperability system.
4. The importance of cybersecurity and digital infrastructure resilience. Estonia's digital public infrastructure was hit by a large-scale cyber attack back in 2007, since then we understood that the cyberwarfare component of the confrontation may be as important as the physical war and something to prepare for. From the start of the full-scale war conflict in Ukraine the rest of the world has been catching up to the same reality.
5. Governments and international organizations are moving towards cross-border interoperability. Some examples of this are EIDAS 2.0 and OOTS (Once-Only Technical System) in the European Union and the One Africa Project launched and curated by Smart Africa.

In his spare time, Maksim loves to travel, he especially finds comfort in spending time outside on gravel bike or trailrunning. Last year he ran the 77 kilometre Grand Canyon rim2rim2rim track in a whopping 10 hours. Lasting digital transformation always needs true commitment and endurance in making things last and clearly Maksim has this covered. Whether it be trailrunning or digital governance - you can get in touch with Digital Nation and Maksim so we can help you build future-ready digital societies.