Government officials are exploring new approaches to data sharing and utilisation that move away from centralised data repositories and instead empower individual departments and agencies to control and share their own data.

Speaking at a recent Think Data for Government conference, Keegan Rowlands, who leads the central government account for IT services firm CACI, said the traditional approach of trying to “boil the ocean” by consolidating all government data into a single system has proven ineffective.
“The scale of data in the UK government is extraordinary. It’s almost unfathomable,” said Rowlands. “We’re setting ourselves up to either successfully boil the ocean – which has never actually worked – or fail.”
Instead, Rowlands advocated for a more decentralised, federated model of data sharing, where individual departments and agencies maintain control over their own data assets but are able to selectively share insights and analysis with other parts of government.
“We have done a lot of work in government trying to establish what we think some of the key concerns are, things like data silos,” he said. “Whilst they can be useful to achieve a benefit for a small group, it is very difficult to extract that benefit and make it more widespread than your department when you beyond that.”
Ali Nicholl, head of engagement at data virtualisation company IOTICS said the key is to start small and focus on improving existing data sharing processes, rather than trying to build a grand, centralised data platform from scratch.
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Nicholl, who involved attendees in Slido polls to illustrate collaboration and information sharing, said a federated approach where data owners maintain control over their information but can selectively share insights, mirrors how people naturally collaborate and share information in the physical world.
“There will always be silos, unless we agree across the entire government sector and related ecosystem that we’re all going to leverage ourselves to a single government operating system, probably owned by an organisation, then there will always be parameters. There will always be barriers.”
Both Rowlands and Nicholl emphasised the importance of involving frontline public servants in the data sharing process, rather than imposing top-down solutions.
“Don’t forget to keep the public servant in mind when you’re thinking about these data problems,” Rowlands said. “They are the people delivering that public service benefit, and you ultimately understand that data better than anybody.”
Ultimately, the speakers said, the goal is to empower government departments and agencies to more effectively leverage their own data assets to improve public services, without getting bogged down in the complexities of centralised data management.