Last week, we were delighted to welcome Charles Baird, Chief Data Architect at ONS; Joss Palmer, Programme Director for OneLondon; and Alex Coley, Managing Director of Epimorphics, to the Hickman for our digital forum on foundational data and how it could help the UK public sector deliver more joined-up services.
Our broad-ranging discussion led to consensus on some important points. Good foundational or reference data is essential, but, as Alex noted, it “isn’t always the sexy part of a project, so it gets forgotten about or not costed in”. Also, the value of reference data is hard to measure. You can’t just look at the number of website hits, and crude measures of data use underestimate the value. Instead, you need to consider the end-to-end ecosystem and recognise the value of data within that ecosystem.
Joss explained:
"We’re not starting from a perfect greenfield site. It’s imperfect and messy”. There isn’t going to be one big programme that solves everything. It’s not realistic in the UK to set up a single population register, for example, our institutions and services are not designed for that, and it would be an enormous change."
Data is best managed close to where it originates. Charles described his ideal approach:
"If I could wave a magic wand and get whatever I wanted from data, it would stop moving around. We would interrogate data in place. We would have data owned by the original producer”."
To get to that point, we need a strong, empowered standards agency that can hold people to account, and we need sustainable funding so that data providers can commit to the long-term maintenance of essential data.
The data itself should remain distributed, but there’s an important role for a central authority to coordinate the setting of standards and check implementation of those, and to ensure long-term funding for data of national importance.
That balance of centralised coordination and distributed data ownership and production is a challenge TPXimpact has tackled in partnership with MHCLG around open digital planning and the planning data platform. Understanding the needs of all the stakeholders and how they cooperate to create a functioning, valuable ecosystem is not always easy, but essential for success.
If you’d like to watch the event in full, you can find it here:
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