Editorial

Cabinet Office selects Automated Intelligence for digital records Spring Clean

Automated Intelligence awarded contract for Cabinet Office’s Artificial Intelligence Data Remediation and Migration Project

Posted 15 March 2023 by Christine Horton


The Cabinet Office has selected Automated Intelligence to deliver its Artificial Intelligence Data Remediation and Migration Project.

The contract will see the Cabinet Office use the firm’s cloud-based data analytics and migration solution, AI.DATALIFT, to locate, retrieve and appraise its records. This allows it to address its “digital heap” by automatically recommending content that should be kept or deleted, said Automated Intelligence.

The two-year contract, worth £473,000, will support the Cabinet Office’s annual ‘Spring Clean’ processes in which it analyses the departments legacy information awaiting a disposal decision. Currently, the department’s DKIM team have 4.9 million files located in ‘holding pens’ where a decision needs to be made on whether to delete or retain the information.

Saving taxpayers millions

Through a previous project using AI.DATALIFT, the Cabinet Office has saved £500,000 per year on storage costs as the DKIM (Department of Knowledge Information Management) team developed their digital appraisal methodology against a dataset of 11 million files. As part of this process, a time and motion study revealed without AI.DATALIFT it would have taken 59 viewers a year to review these files for disposal, at a cost of £2.2 million to the public purse. In addition, Automated Intelligence said the process has ensured compliance with the public legislation records act while enabling the Cabinet Office “to explore the use of in-house subject matter expertise, data science skills and techniques to enable faster innovation opportunities.”

In the recently released contract Cabinet Office stated: “Automated Intelligence’s digital appraisal methodology helps organisations decide which records to keep for permanent preservation and which records to delete, helping to manage the exponential growth of born digital records that has resulted in the digital heap.”

To date, the Cabinet Office’s (DKIM) team have utilised AI.DATALIFT to “review, analyse and cleanse up to 11 million individual files held in 170 differing formats.”

The Cabinet Office said the model is expected to continue to deliver benefits including cost avoidance and enabling legal obligations to be met, including analysing c350,000 files per year for future ‘Spring Clean,’ exercises.”

Speaking about the contract renewal, Automated Intelligence’s CEO, Simon Cole said: “We’re absolutely delighted to be working with the Cabinet Office on their Artificial Intelligence Data Remediation and Migration Project. Our innovative AI.DATALIFT solution will meet the specific challenges of central government organisations. We have extensive experience and expertise to help these organisations manage their growing data and information challenges.”