Using Data to Design Government Services

Making plans: This illustration by Anthony Townsend, research director of the Institute for the Future, is meant to represent various strategies for using technology in city services. 

Credit: Institute for the Future

Using Data to Design Government Services

Cities are trying to tap into information generated by mobile phones, but that approach threatens to leave poor people behind.

Citizens are becoming the source of a lot of information that helps cities improve how they provide public services. For example, Boston just unveiled an iPhone app that uses the device's accelerometer to detect possible potholes in city roads. Housing officials in South Africa use information from mobile phones to track conditions in temporary settlements. But although these technologies can help direct officials' attention to problems they need to address, designing government initiatives around them could fail to account for the people who lack the latest devices.

"It's clear to me that we're not including the poor in our visions of future cities," says Anthony Townsend, research director of the nonprofit Institute for the Future, who recently completed a study on how cities can take the needs of the poor into account when they make use of the data unlocked by new technologies. "There's a danger of further empowering those who are already empowered and excluding those who are already disempowered."

Recommendations

Recommendation 1: Public-sector organizations should offer synthetic datasets, which they can share with others so that requests for data adhere to the right data standards in each organization.

Recommendation 2: Within the Government’s Framework for Data Processing, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport should create a Data Quality Assurance Toolkit and ensure that public-sector bodies submit data to be tested.

Recommendation 3: The Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport should create a seal of approval, similar to the O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing (ORCAA), which indicates that data quality is satisfactory and that biases within datasets have been accounted for.

Recommendation 4: Technology vendors selling to public-sector bodies should ensure that their products are compatible with relevant Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), allowing this technology to overcome interoperability issues and the government to change providers with ease.

Recommendation 5: Moving forward, it should be mandatory for any system procured within the public sector to adopt open standards, encouraging competition and improving interoperability by avoiding vendor lock-in situations.

Recommendation 6: Government departments should identify and support initiatives like Understanding Patient Data in all policy areas, supporting organizations if they need to properly engage citizens and understand how they want their data to be used across public services.

Recommendation 7: All government departments should prepare to develop audit trails that track how data is used to ensure every interaction with personal data is auditable, transparent, and secure.

Recommendation 8: Government should, in partnership with the Information Commissioner’s Office, investigate and publicize the optimum training needed to familiarise public servants with the handling of personal data, to reduce the fear of using and sharing personal data.

Recommendation 9: The Information Commissioner’s Office should continue to partner with specialist organizations, like the former Centre of Excellence for Information Sharing, who help demystify legislation, with resources and case studies specifically catered to public-sector bodies.

Recommendation 10: The new Data Advisory Board should focus its attention on tackling the difficult challenges of stopping effective multi-agency data sharing. The Advisory Board should include a representative from each department to ensure collective responsibility.

Recommendation 11: Data-sharing policy should be included in the remit of the Chief Data Officer, so there is a specific individual championing best practices towards data sharing across siloed departments.

Recommendation 12: Leadership on the sharing of individuals’ personal data should come from the Cabinet Office rather than the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport to help to ensure that the Government’s data-sharing strategy has an influence that reaches across departments.

Recommendation 13: Local government should play an important role in the establishment of data standards and infrastructure. By giving local areas space to try and test data-sharing arrangements, it will help to demonstrate which projects are successful and could be scaled-up regionally and nationally.

https://reform.uk/