What will the future of data in public sector look like?

What does the future of data in the public sector look like? At the recent Think Data for Government event in London, experts from the private and public sector shared their thoughts on what we might expect to see in a few years’ time.

One of the biggest goals for the future? Greater multi-agency data sharing.

Rhiannon Lawson, digital transformation leader at Capita Public envisions the government expanding its current ‘Tell Us Once’ service, which is currently used to let people report a death to most government departments in one go.

“I think in five years’ time, what it’s going to be is more like something that’s expanded from the Tell Us Once, and hopefully we will have more opportunities to just hand government one piece of data, and then it’s just shared everywhere. And the way to get that done is to get the basics right.”

Lucy Vickers, chief data officer and chief statistician at the Department of Health & Social Care agreed that “there are many providers within health and care, and the systems don’t talk to each other,” which adds to the stress of people, often when they are their most vulnerable.

She called for a more “interoperable, graduated” method of data sharing between different healthcare suppliers.

Katherine Williamson, chief data officer, Department for Transport also noted that more data sharing within the transportation sector is needed.

“Our sector is very siloed,” she said. “If you want to take a multimodal journey, you might find you have a parking app. You have a different app for booking your train tickets. You might have a different app, again, for an e-scooter or something like that. It’s a very fragmented landscape. I’m not promising it’s even 10 years away, but the dream is to be able to use data to integrate to allow customers and operators to be able to really understand what that multimodal landscape looks like, and in turn, open that up to more people – be it journey planning applications, be it private industry, to allow people to travel the way we want to travel.”

Getting users involved in decision-making

Gavin Freeguard, a special adviser at the Open Data Institute, policy associate at Connected by Data and associate at the Institute for Government, noted that the public sector is currently facing a huge amount of change.

“We’ve talked already about the AI hype, some of which is not hype, some of which is. We’ve got a new Government which is talking about getting data driven technologies at the centre of service to people. And there’s a lot of great opportunity there, and a lot of it does come from fixing those foundations, trying to build services around the person, making transparent where all these things are being used.

“What I would like to see is involving those groups, people, families, communities, public servants in some of the decisions about what we’re doing with data. Because there are some really political decisions there. I think we have a better understanding now, not only the benefits of data, but of the limitations of the need to take those conversations wider beyond just spreadsheets and databases.”

Lack of trust a barrier to Data sharing

However, one of the biggest challenges to achieving the dream of data sharing is a lack of trust between organisations, said Lawson.

“When Covid hit and all of government opened up and said, we can now talk in completely free ways. We’ve moved a whole lot of security protocols that people on Teams can speak to people on Google, etc, and I hoped that those learnings would result in everything staying open, and I don’t think that’s happened.

“I think a lot of the barriers have come back down, and there needs to be more trust between organisations to share that data.

“[We need to] get trust, both from users and citizens, and that is why getting users involved with those decisions so that they understand how the data is being used and where it’s been, but also trust between organisations, is so important. I don’t think it’s impossible. I do think it’s possible as long as everyone’s talking.”