In 2021 the Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched the Digital Strategy for Defence describing how its proposed transformation of technology, ways of working and processes will allow the seamless sharing and exploitation of data.
George Carter, interim chief data officer in the Royal Air Force (RAF) was recently in conversation with James Herbert, CEO of Pivotl, the Think Data for Government event, where they discussed implementing a new data strategy for the Air Force (pictured).
“We’ve designed our aircraft and our missions to be very successful, but those exist in their aircraft and mission bubbles. So, the job that we wanted to do was to turn that into more of an ecosystem approach,” explained Carter.
Three principles to data strategy
Carter outlined three principles to the strategy.
The first was empowering employees to be able to use data instead of having one central team. “[We’re] giving people the tools to serve themselves rather than telling them, we’ll solve their problems for them,” said Carter.
Part of offering self-service tools is letting people choose their tech, he said.
“We tried not to be vendor specific. We try not to go ‘here is the platform that you will use to do data stuff’, and instead focused on saying, ‘okay, assuming you’re all going to use different tech and you’re going to have different preferences and different solutions, how do we make sure we can get that collaborative value of all that technology?”
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The next principle was based on speeding up the decision-making process, which saw the Air Force champion data as a product.
“Begin from the outcome, and do a thin slice of architecture policy, metadata management, cataloguing, analytics, but let’s make sure we do that in a way that still builds towards our target architecture,” he said.
The last principle was governance and “trying to not allow empowerment become a mess.”
He said: “Everyone’s heard the paradigm of your data lake becoming a data swamp. How do we avoid that scenario? And so, we’ve sorted out some federated governance principles that empowers people locally and gives them quite firm direction on how they’re going to manage and organise the data and what their accountability is.
“There are things that we have to worry about in defence, like legality, safety, data retention, if we’ve made decisions on certain decisions or certain bits of data that we absolutely have to bake into how we do data. We cannot afford to ignore those or do them retrospectively. But balancing that ‘need to know’ principle which we love against a ‘dare to share’ principle and trying to break that culture from ‘that’s personal data as I can possibly share with you’ to ‘Okay, let’s talk through the legitimacy of your use of data and what the ramifications are and come up with an approach that works.’”
Save the date! The next Think Data for Government is on June 5, 2024.
