Almaty city Department of Digitalization invites residents to share ideas for data governance projects

Department of Digitalization will launch this year Almaty Data Lake – to enable secure and depersonalized data exchange between state bodies, commercial companies and academic institutions.

The ultimate goal of Almaty Data Lake is to create a basis for data-driven decision and provide a secure environment for data usage by external subscribers (IT-Sandbox).

The project was supported by both government agencies and commercial companies. A free-of-charge pilot project has been run since October 2020, jointly by the Department of Digitalization, a Singaporean company CrimsonLogic PTE Ltd, and a local company “ALSECO” JSC. The pilot is targeted to integrate one state database (State Database of Individuals) and one commercial (Unified Utilities’ Payments). As a result of integration, databases of utility service providers have significantly increased: from 23% or more depending on a supplier. For example, in “Almaty Su” (cold water supplier), consumer base increased by almost 258 thousand people; more than 87 thousand consumers were identified on personal accounts without individual metering devices, that led to increase in company's revenue of 58.7 million tenge in March and 55.7 million tenge in April respectively. "Almaty Heat Networks" analyzed year-to-year payments for hot water supply (April 2020 and 2021): the difference in income amounted to 57.8 million tenge (11%), and consumer database increased by 243,387 people (34.5%).

It is envisaged that increase in income of utility service providers will be applied towards modernization and development of city utility infrastructure.

Next data governance project will study labor migration of graduates of Almaty colleges and universities. Every year, about 50 thousand young specialists are graduated from city educational institutions, whose subsequent fate is almost unknown: whether they return to their homelands, whether they work by their specialty. This is especially true for those who studied on a state grant – are specialties encouraged through state grants in demand in the labour market? Graduates from which colleges and universities do Almaty employers prefer to hire? What specialties and universities should school graduates focus on? Almaty Akimat plans to work out these questions in cooperation with National Chamber of Entrepreneurs "Atameken", Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population, and “Uchet.kz” company.