Helena LindholmChief Data Officer · Essays & perspectiveHelena Lindholm Chief Data Officer · Europe
A selected perspective
Data sovereignty5 min read
Client data on terms clients can withdraw
Public-sector buyers now ask where their data is stored. The more useful question is who can reach it, from which country, under whose law, and how the provider would know if any of that changed.
Separating 138 client analytics environments after finding one access group that reached them all
In September 2021 a review by my office found that a support access group used by 64 platform engineers could read every one of the 138 client environments in our managed analytics service.
Training a service-desk model only on the tickets clients agreed to share
In 2023 our service desks handled 6.8 million tickets a year for about 1,400 clients, and our product team proposed a language model trained on five years of those tickets to route requests and draft replies.
Selling an operations benchmark only to the clients who supply it
By 2023 Lumivara held seven years of operational data from running clients' systems: incident rates, time to apply security patches, cloud cost per workload and service-desk volumes for hundreds of comparable organisations.
An IT services company holds a great deal of data that is not its own: other organisations' records, logs, tickets and backups, entrusted to it so that their systems keep running. I treat that data as held on terms. Before we store it somewhere new, let a new person reach it, train a model on it or build a product from it, I ask whether the client would recognise the use from the contract they signed. If I would hesitate to explain it to their data protection officer, we do not do it.
IT services firms hold years of their clients' tickets, logs and documents, and the case for training shared AI models on them looks compelling. Without each client's explicit and revocable agreement, it turns a service provider into something its contracts never described.
Running other organisations' systems produces operational data that could make a valuable benchmark. I argue that such products should be sold only to the clients who contribute to them, with disclosure rules borrowed from official statistics, and never to the vendors who sell to those clients.
Clients whose data Lumivara holds
2,300
Public sector, banks, utilities and manufacturers, 2026
Capital to give 138 clients separate tenancies
€9.4m
Managed analytics service, 2021–2022
Deletion certificates issued
312
Every departing client since June 2020
A provider that holds other organisations' data earns the right to use it only on terms each client can read, check and withdraw from, and I build Lumivara's data practice so that those terms are visible.
I am chief data officer of Lumivara Oyj, a listed Helsinki IT services company that runs applications, cloud platforms and data services for about 2,300 public-sector bodies, banks, utilities and manufacturers in the Nordic and Baltic countries. We earned €1.24 billion of revenue in 2025 and employ 8,600 people. My group data office of 146 people sets how client data is separated, accessed, retained and deleted across our six data centres; governs every AI system we build or deploy; runs our internal data platform; and owns a small line of data products that earned €23 million last year. I report to our chief executive, Petri Halmesaari, and to the board's audit and risk committee every quarter.
I began as a statistician in 1999 at a social research institute in Helsinki, where I learnt that a carefully published table can still identify a person. I then built customer analytics at a regional telecoms operator in Vaasa, spent eight years advising Nordic clients on data platforms from a Stockholm consultancy and in 2016 crossed to the operator side, at a Swedish hosting company that Lumivara bought in 2019. I became Lumivara's first chief data officer in February 2021.
My questions are practical. Who, by name and country, can reach a client's data tonight? Can we prove that data is gone when a client leaves? May we train a model on tickets our clients' employees wrote to our service desk? And which data products can we build from running our clients' systems without selling what is theirs? My answers have cost Lumivara margin, some revenue and at least six clients.
A separate tenancy for every analytics client
After finding an engineering role with read access across 138 client environments, I argued for full separation rather than a permissions fix. It cost €9.4 million of capital and €3.1 million a year; six clients left over price, and the service margin fell from 24% to 18% before recovering to 21%.
An AI model trained only on tickets clients chose to share
We declined to train a service-desk model on every client's tickets. Forty-seven clients opted in under a separate addendum. The model routes 86% of their tickets correctly, and the saving reached €6.1 million in 2025 against the €14 million first projected.
A benchmark sold only to its contributors
Our operations benchmark is available only to the 212 clients who supply data to it, with at least eight contributors behind every figure. It earned €8.4 million in 2025. We gave up vendor sales estimated at €6 million a year.
Deletion that comes with evidence
Since June 2020 every departing client receives a signed deletion certificate covering production data and backups, made possible by destroying per-client backup keys. We have issued 312. Our auditors found two systems the certificate missed in 2021, and we fixed both.
Current focus
I am preparing our AI governance for the EU AI Act's obligations as they phase in, starting from a register of the 61 AI systems we build, use or provide to clients. I am also working with our cloud business on the EU Data Act's switching obligations, so that a client leaving us can take a complete, usable copy of its data without asking twice.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking another executive role. I would consider one non-executive seat on a Nordic company board with no material contract with Lumivara and no business competing with ours, subject to my chief executive's consent. I accept a few advisory and speaking invitations each year.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Kallbacka Research InstituteNon-executive director; chair of the research data committee · March 2020–present
Formation
Master of Science in statisticsMerikallio University · 1999
Master of Laws in information technology law (part-time)Kronvik University · 2013
Helena told my committee that the measure we had been reading for a year flattered us, and replaced it with one that made us look worse. She then reported it every quarter until it improved. That is rarer in a management team than it should be.
Ingrid VesterholmChair, audit and risk committee, Lumivara OyjThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not seeking another executive role. I would consider one non-executive seat on a Nordic company board with no material contract with Lumivara and no business competing with ours, subject to my chief executive's consent. I accept a few advisory and speaking invitations each year.
