The government held a strategic session on the digitization of industry

The White House calls on industrialists and software developers to join forces to transition to a domestic digital system to support the full life cycle of products manufactured in the Russian Federation. As follows from the statements made on Tuesday at the core strategic session, the main costs of developing import-substituting software will fall on business, and state investments are limited to supporting grants. For projects to be successful, the state and business will also have to agree on “top-level” issues, such as the compatibility of data exchange formats. So far, what is happening in this area looks like a search for a consistent concept in which businesses will be ready to invest.

At a strategic session on the transition of industry to a domestic digital system for supporting the full life cycle of products, held on Tuesday at the government coordination center, they talked about the need to unite the efforts of industrialists and software developers. We are talking primarily about cooperation within large projects.

Let us recall that in the summer of 2022, industrial competence centers (ICCs, unite representatives of industries in which it is necessary to replace foreign software) and development competence centers (CDCs, which include software developers) were created. “About 200 particularly significant projects with a total funding volume of over 230 billion rubles have already been selected. Most of it is private investment. The amount of grants from the budget will exceed 25 billion rubles,” Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said at the session.

The Ministry of Digital Development explained to Kommersant that in 2022, 13 projects were supported for the transition to the use of Russian PLM solution systems (for life cycle management), and the volume of grants exceeded 13 billion rubles. “The money has been delivered to customers, work is underway, and most of these projects will be completed in 2025. Their implementation will allow Russian companies to refine their solutions to the level of international analogues and scale up their implementation, including in such industries as automotive, aircraft and shipbuilding, heavy and general engineering,” the department noted.

According to Mikhail Mishustin, a number of industrial leaders are now actively working on individual elements of “heavy class” industrial software. Within the framework of the ICC, there are about 40 such projects with total funding of over 40 billion rubles. The Prime Minister noted that the introduction of advanced products requires changes in technological and business processes. “At the national level, it is necessary to agree on uniform rules and formats for data exchange, including the approval of new standards. We need a so-called integration bus for all Russian developments, which will simplify the interaction of various platforms,” said the head of government. According to him, such work should be synchronized within the framework of the emerging national project “Data Economy”.

Let us note that the development of promising digital technologies is impossible without resolving the issue of data. According to experts, it is necessary to create mechanisms for interaction between producers and consumers of data, including regulating the processes of purchase and sale, exchange of arrays of information and their enrichment by market participants. The strategic session showed that there is still no clear understanding of how a unified digital environment will be formed. The head of the Ministry of Digital Development, Maksut Shadayev, previously noted that the Russian Federation’s approaches to data regulation are close to the position of China, whose authorities believe that all data belongs to the state. In these conditions, a business, if it does not want data exchange standards to be imposed on it “from above,” will apparently have to take a more active position in this matter.

Venera Petrova