Editorial

IT chief outlines DWP data challenge

DWP’s head of data strategy Katharine Purser reveals challenge of establishing new Chief Data Office

Posted 21 October 2021 by Christine Horton


The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s head of data strategy and enablement Katharine Purser has spoken of the challenges of establishing its new Chief Data Office (CDO).

DWP Digital launched the CDO on October 15. Led by chief data officer Paul Lodge, the function follows a strategy compiled by Purser. The aim of the CDO is to adopt a more strategic approach to data and improve the experiences of the millions of citizens accessing DWP services each year.

At a Digital Leaders webinar reported by Computer Weekly, Purser talked about the challenges of “establishing the CDO to help staff understand the value of data and how it can be used to serve citizens, as well her vision for data in government and priorities for the DWP in that space.”

Purser acknowledged the scale of the DWP’s data challenge. According to her, the department processes more than 200 terabytes of data, which continues to grow by around 10 percent a year.

“We’ve seen the volume of our customers double, and a 25 percent increase in staff numbers,” Purser said, in relation to the workforce boost to cope with the additional demand for services ranging from working and age support to disability and ill health benefits, such as Universal Credit, Carer’s Allowance and state pension.

“We use data every day to make critical decisions about individuals’ lives – about how much financial support they might be entitled to, whether that’s a statutory benefit or pension or child maintenance,” Purser said, adding that this usually happens at a point where people might be quite vulnerable. “The more we know about them, the more we can do to help and the better we can support them, and data helps us do that.”

Computer Weekly notes that one of the key challenges for the CDO function mentioned by Purser during her presentation is interoperability. According to the director, the department has created separate systems to cater for changes in government policy over time and that has created a significant barrier to advancing data use.

“Broadly speaking, data is not interoperable [in DWP]. Because we have different approaches to capturing and storing data, it means it can’t easily be used across multiple systems,” she said. “[Data] often needs to be transferred between systems manually or in large batches – it’s possible to do, and we do that, but it’s time consuming, costly and it’s prone to error.”

Data is “not well mastered” within DWP, she said, and collecting information through different systems and for disparate purposes means that data inconsistencies and duplications may occur.

“While we have the right piece of information for the purpose and we know that is true, we don’t have a systematic way to identify what the most recent piece of information that we have about someone,” Purser said, citing the example of citizens who have provided multiple addresses to the government.