Achieving faster time to insight – why legacy approaches to data management are holding government organisations back

One of the biggest challenges government departments face in effectively leveraging their data resources is the complex data management process that holds sway in many such organisations today. Government has historically often turned to the major systems integrators to handle this for them. Teams of developers have had to be employed to carry out complex coding from intricate legacy systems. Public sector departments incurred significant bills for the software together with a large premium for the services required to drive it in. And they face an opportunity cost because of the slow rate at which this typically happens today.

Departments typically face a data tax on two fronts. First, the physical cost involved in hiring the developers to complete the feeds and then the opportunity cost of having to defer benefits due to the slowness of the process. There has to be a better approach.

Data responsibility

According to a recent research, the lack of digital skills gap costs the UK economy £12.8 billion a year. And this issue stands on both sides – within the public sector organisations and among the citizens. Since Covid-19 data transformation projects in public sector have exploded as everyone realised the need for greater and easiest access to trusted data. However, the complexity of the architectures, the lack of flexibility and scalability and resources have made it more difficult for these organisations to build modern systems that foster greater adoption by the citizens.

For public sector organisations to succeed and before starting a solution selection process, the first and required step is about creating a data and digital culture which will gain momentum through the education of every stakeholder. And any data literacy program must first be sponsored at the highest level of the organisations and involves the data experts, human resources and other management. Data literacy is even more crucial in public sector due to the very sensitive nature of the data that is being processed. When a strong data culture is in place, data citizens are able to answer the following: what is the data being processed, where it is coming from, where it is stored and why it is being used. This will automatically ensure a greater sense of data responsibility and consciousness.

Faster access to trusted data

The complexity of the infrastructures and solutions inherited from different approaches and managements prevent public sector organisations from achieving greater efficiency and providing the level of services that the digital native citizens are looking for. The lack of skilled resources in the public sector builds another barrier to data and digital excellence. In order to ensure quality, accuracy, compliance and establish data trust throughout the organisation applications must be smarter than ever before, providing intelligence and automation from data ingestion to data delivery and at all steps in between. Augmentation and automation through AI, machine learning, and other technologies drive business efficiency and help organisations overcome resource constraints and other limitations in the modern data workforce.

Data integration and management solutions should provide the ability to track and visualise the entire history of data quality, rather than simply a single point in time, to help users identify data drifting or issues that may impact the usability of data. Then, this history can be applied to the micro or macro level by creating logical groups of datasets per your business needs. Ideally, users should have a console view that not only surfaces issues with data quality and data drift, but also provides a self-service launchpad to take action on problem data.

Governance as a backbone

Data governance is a key component of business agility and productivity as well as privacy and regulatory initiatives. Ever-increasing data privacy regulations, coupled with increasingly complex AI and ML models that rely on contextually accurate and complete datasets, will create new governance use cases to both eliminate risk and support data sharing initiatives.

Governance is not only foundational to compliance and data privacy efforts; it also allows companies to understand all data assets holistically with emphasis on their accuracy and relevance to each organisation’s individual business needs. Public sector organisations should look at platforms able to manage the entire data life cycle while providing data cataloguing solution including metadata capabilities with full visualisation of data lineage, allowing users to see the full lifecycle of the data and address issues at the root cause. Custom business metamodels for example ensure complete flexibility — rather than using pre-defined templates, users can now define and configure business models that are entirely contextual to their organisations business workflows.

Through the National Data Strategy, the UK government wants to leverage the power of data and build a competitive digital nation. To be able to achieve this data excellence and provide a greater digital experience to the citizens, organisations must look at unified and scalable platforms which can guarantee data trust, access and monitoring to make sure data becomes an always-on, always accessible multiplier for organisations and not only something that certain people use at certain times.