Digital technologies have created huge new possibilities, turning records of past work into valuable assets. Stuart Watson reports on a round table on the power of information governance to transform the civil service’s work.
Information plays a vital role in the design and operation of public services. Partly, this reflects the traditional importance of memos, minutes, policy drafts, reports and written correspondence within our public sector – but statistical datasets are playing an increasingly important role. The importance of data was underlined in June, when ministers backed a report – commissioned from pollster Stephan Shakespeare – that called for a national data strategy to support economic growth.
In his report, Shakespeare wrote: “Imagine if we could combine all the data we produce on education and health, tax and spending, work and productivity, and use that to enhance the myriad decisions which define our future. Well, we can, right now.”
At a recent Civil Service World round table, supported by knowledge management software specialist HP Autonomy, a group of information management professionals discussed what the civil service must do to realise that vision.
Transparency
The coalition government has championed the cause of open data. This, together with the Freedom of Information Act and increasingly assertive parliamentary select committees, has ratcheted up pressure on civil servants to release information quickly. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra’s) head of strategy and portfolio development, Stephen Latham, said that the government’s response to Shakespeare’s report has “changed the game” in terms of the management of government information.
“There was a very clear drive from Cabinet Office to publish inventories of data, and to create a national information infrastructure which will be launched at the end of October. It will be a subset of those datasets which are regarded as critical in terms of economic growth,” he said. “Whereas [previously] we have struggled internally to get a clear sight of what data we have, being given a clear directive that says ‘You must publish this list’ has been very valuable, in terms of not only publishing it and giving visibility to it externally, but also understanding what we have got ourselves.”
Defra has identified over 1,500 unpublished datasets and published details of their existence on the web, he says. The department hopes to generate feedback from commercial and not-for-profit enterprises on which packages of data they would find most useful, so that scarce resources can be channelled into making those datasets fit for release.
Those resources will be essential: releasing data can be a long process, said Neil Dexter, senior privacy rights manager at the Department for Education. He cited the example of the national pupil database, which was published following strong interest from social and educational researchers. In that case, he said, an enormous amount of work was required to ensure that the information was anonymised: “We are talking about 11 million children, and we gather probably 250 pieces of information per year on each person,” he said. To guarantee that anonymity wouldn’t be breached, “we had ‘hackathon’ weekends, inviting [computer hackers] to get some data, hack it up and see if they could identify themselves or people they knew.”
Even where data has already been published, it may need work before it’s useful to the public. Local authorities have already allowed the public to access much of their data, said Michael Jennings, a member of the government’s advisory panel on public sector information and founder of the Local Government Information House – yet it may not be in the right format for a new group of users. Councils have been “putting lots of information into applications available on websites already – book your school place, report a pothole, and so on,” he said. “Nevertheless, there were quite a lot of problems in getting things fit for purpose [for open data publication] because there were a lot of systems designed to enable officers to deliver services, not to provide public engagement and information.”
An additional pressure has been placed on some departments, with the requirement to publish more archived information. In January, the government began its move towards releasing information after 20 years rather than 30 – and Carryl Allardice, head of knowledge and information management at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said this task will test her team, which must release two years’ worth of records each year for the next ten years. Further, the growth in the collection of information and the size of databases means that the task of deciding whether information should be published is getting bigger every year.
Barriers to sharing
The attendees agreed that sharing information across government departments and agencies is a tricky issue, and technology was identified as one of the thorniest problems. “We can’t even transfer information between ourselves, let alone anybody else,” admitted Alain Ellis from DWP. “Partly that’s due to the nature of the information – we have issues with security, because 90% of it is personal data – but also because we are on so many antiquated systems that can’t talk to each other.”
Latham reported that Defra has a similar difficulty with its many arm’s-length bodies – such as the Environment Agency and Natural England – running incompatible systems. And Joan Ogbebor, a programme and project manager with the Inspectorate of Constabulary, added: “We deal with 43 police forces across England and Wales. They all have different systems in place. Other stakeholders such as the College of Policing have their own. It is hard to marry these different systems.”
Jo Moorshead, information management consultant at the National Archives, observed that “because we work across government, this is something that we see a lot of – almost a Wild West of different systems across government.” To regain some sort of control, she suggested that departments simplify systems “by looking at what they need to do from a business perspective and getting systems that address those needs, rather than having a multitude of systems that bolt in here and there.”
Latham said there is no quick fix for the problem, but Defra is attempting to address it in the medium- to long-term: “We are trying to plot a strategic direction within the organisation, and across organisations where possible,” he said. “Because of the investment involved, and because people have all entered into contracts at different times so have commercial commitments, it is going to take time. But if you have that common strategic direction, then when people come up to making decisions they can see where it might go.”
HP Autonomy’s David Kemp was keen to look for the opportunities rather than the barriers, and argued that is possible to search for information across departmental silos while ensuring that the user sees only what they are permitted to see. “The technology exists for you to be able to connect to anything in a digital format, in any volume, in any language and in audio, visual and alpha-numeric formats. The question is how do you want to make it work?” he asked.
Tim Callister from The National Archives agreed that technology is not the main barrier to sharing data and making best use of it. Instead, he said, “the challenge is ownership of information. Who owns it? What is dependent on it? What is the risk if we don’t have access to that information or can’t share it? Without those policy decisions the brilliance of the tools is for naught, because you don’t know why you have the information.”
Jennings recalled that the Local Government Information House solved the problem of local authorities storing data about their property on different systems by introducing “tagging” to create a national database: “It didn’t matter what systems people had, as long as they used this unique property reference number which would then connect between any system across the country.” A similar approach in Whitehall, he said, “would help overcome some of the silo approaches. If we can get 450 local authorities working together, I don’t think it beyond the wit of man to get central government organisations to do so.”
However, he did identify another factor that might limit data sharing in the public sector: as sectors such as education and health are opened up to internal competition, schools and hospitals may be increasingly reluctant to share data that could aid their rivals. “There are limits as to how much you are going to want to share your data with people who are potentially after your share of the market,” Jennings warned.
Cutting costs
Autonomy’s Kemp identified four benefits of better data management: information sharing and collaboration; efficiency and operational cost reduction; avoiding data losses and increasing public confidence through greater transparency; and the ability to engage better with customers. He asked: “Has anybody articulated to senior managers what the business advantages are in terms of revenue savings? There might even be some revenue earnings here.”
TNA’s Callister was not convinced that the business case for investment in better data management stands up if couched purely in terms of cost savings: “There are ways you can use initiatives around information governance strategies to reduce overheads, but replacing a document management system with something smaller and lighter might not immediately show a reduction, because you have the implementation costs,” he said. “The struggle is to get the message across that this is not just a cash saving opportunity. We are actually trying to make people happier by making it easier for them to find [information] so they can do things.”
Latham also chipped in here: “It is extremely difficult to articulate the sort of thing we are talking about in language that makes sense to senior managers,” he said. “You have to talk about it in terms of the business impact: information overload and what you can do about it, and the impact on customers of more efficient approaches to sharing information, so you don’t need to ask for the same thing three times.”
Culture and leadership
The attendees agreed that no record management system will be effective unless civil servants use it properly. “The issue is really getting people to appreciate and value information as an asset,” said FCO’s Allardice. “We are trying to catalyse the record-keeping culture by embedding specialists within the business to help individual directorates or business units [receive] training, structure their information appropriately, and use external information effectively.”
Moorshead argued that all information management should be based on an appreciation of the value of data. She added: “When information has no value any more, we must not be afraid of getting rid of it.”
Ogbebor suggested that some managers responsible for the public bodies’ strategic direction lack the technical knowledge to blaze a trail in this area: “Most of the time the strategic heads are not as technically or digitally inclined as they ought to be, and the technical experts are doing things on their own,” she said.
The information management profession in the public sector is under-developed, argued Jennings. But as Latham pointed out: “In the Civil Service Reform Plan, which was published last year, government identified 24 key professions – and that includes a knowledge and information management profession. Compared to some of the others, I guess it’s immature, but government is responding to that.”
Future trends: social media and ‘big data’
The increasingly widespread use of social media presents a challenge for information management professionals. How is it possible to capture a record of government-related activity on such sites, without breaching their intellectual property rights?
Several of the attendees noted that the push to engage with citizens directly – under the Open Policymaking agenda, for example – has led to departments using external websites to provide access to information that would once have been available through departmental sites. There are dangers in doing so, warned Callister: “We ask departments to think about whether it is appropriate to use a web-based tool and where it might put them or their information at risk,” he said.
Latham urged a permissive approach to social media, provided that clear policies are in place to minimise the dangers. He closed the discussion on a positive note, by looking forward to the possibilities provided by ‘big data’.
“We are publishing a lot of data using open standards, and there is a huge capability among academics and researchers to put together the data we have and the data sources in environment and agriculture that are out there,” he said.
“We are facing a pace of change we haven’t seen before in terms of technology, user expectations, transparency and cost reduction pressures,” he continued: the coalition government is committed to publishing more datasets, and the growth in different forms of data presents an enormous challenge to the information management profession. But Latham was enthusiastic about the “tremendous opportunities.”
If government can find a way to better integrate and share its data, it can be more proactive in publishing information, and pull together evidence to drive better policymaking. For the information management profession, the best is yet to come.
Chair: Joshua Chambers, deputy and online editor, Civil Service World