How important is it to appraise data within the public sector?
Public sector organisations have increasingly gathered vast volumes of data over the years, and it has now become a priority for those organisations to understand their data, and their data management processes as part of their transformation journey.
With growing privacy regulations, public sector organisations also have an increasing obligation to ensure that data held on citizens is for specific purpose and removed thereafter.
As a result, public sector organisations have a civic duty to be transparent to citizens about how they conduct their business. At the highest-level, Ministerial decisions and the information pertaining to those decisions are public records that must be preserved and made accessible for current and future generations. This requirement forces organisations to appraise the value of the information they maintain within the organisation and ensures the retention of the information that meets the test of value and legitimate public interest.
Can you talk about some of the challenges associated with this?
How we capture data and information has transitioned from paper-based processes to digital in recent years. While this transition has revolutionised how we work and interact, providing numerous benefits such as easy access to records, enhanced collaboration and improved information governance, there are a number of challenges public sector organisations must overcome in order to appraise the value of their data. These include:
- The scale of the problem – The volume of data that we create is rising exponentially, to put it in perspective in just the last five years, data storage requirements is growing on average at 19.2 percent, with the pandemic accelerating this trend.
- Overcoming legacy practices – Organisations have attempted to apply process and rules to the creation and management of data, but the reality is, many of the records management systems that have been implemented just don’t work, coupled with staff not having the time to manage the information they create on a daily basis.
- Accessing data – although physical paper records may not have changed format over the years, the same cannot be said for digital records, information is stored a wide variety of electronic formats that continue to evolve. Organisations need to be able to appraise information across all of the current and legacy formats of the digital age in order to make the correct retention decisions.
How much has the last two years changed the digital landscape in the public sector?
The last two years has certainly been challenging for public sector organisations, many have been forced to modernise their day-to-day collaboration platforms with incredible speed. Often at times, being forced to make less that satisfactory decisions in the face of a continuity crisis and also due to the impact of external events over which they have had no control.
The challenge that has arisen from the pandemic is that data has become increasing siloed. As public sector bodies quickly moved to online collaboration platforms, much of the data was left behind in legacy solutions or worse the data was copied in bulk into modern platforms without any form of management, review or planning.
What advice can you give government or public sector organisations for managing their digital estate?
We’d encourage organisations to take action by learning to understand their data, analysing it and using informed insights gained from discovery across legacy, hybrid and cloud environments. This can enable effective decision-making, provide value, increase productivity and reduce risks along with ongoing storage costs.
How can Automated Intelligence help in the process?
Automated Intelligence has significant experience and expertise supporting discovery, appraisal and digital transformation projects across the public sector and a range of industries. Our unique cloud-based analytics and migration solution, AI.DATALIFT, leverages the latest innovations and intelligence in data management technology to enable organisations to organise, consolidate, migrate and ultimately transform their data holdings.
Our powerful and intuitive data management platform includes a range of capabilities helping your organisation to collate and understand your data, remove the DROT, organise your data and manage the information lifecycle.
We believe our solutions will help public sector organisations streamline their data, take control of their budgets, reduce operational costs and ensure compliance measures are in place to protect citizen data.
To learn more about the importance of data appraisal, and how best to manage your digital estate, download the new Automated Intelligence Whitepaper.
