Is there something else councils should know?

David Waltho, head of government affairs for business analytics software and services provider SAS, looks at the recent Audit Commission report into data management.

The Audit Commission’s new national report ‘Is there something I should know?’ provides access to excellent research, advice and tools designed to help local government bodies make the most of their information assets to transform performance.

Encouragingly the report is the latest in a wide range of strategies and guidelines issued from all parts of government, which emphasise the importance and benefits of better use of information for all levels and disciplines across the public sector – from improving policy and strategy, through to boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of front line services. This signals a significant and welcome switch in perspective from the numerous ‘closing the gate after the horse has bolted’ post mortems reports that followed high profile data losses in organisations such as DWP, HMRC, MOD and NHS. Each of these reports identified the root cause as a systemic failure in general information management and culture throughout the organisations concerned. It is heartening that this is now being addressed more holistically by the public sector.

But can better information management really help the public sector bridge the chasm between accelerating demand and reversing budgets? Does the Audit Commission report go far enough? Is the seemingly uncoordinated blizzard of government reports on the subject in danger of confusing rather than clarifying?

However, despite case studies from leading councils who already ‘do more with less by working smarter’, the research highlights significant gaps between the few that are walking the walk and the many that are talking the talk. Thus, although almost 95 per cent of councils report that better use of information is now an increased strategic priority, the majority have yet to lay the basic foundation stone of data quality. Also most councils appear to be driven to action by external requirements for compliance and performance reporting, rather than truly seeing information as akey strategic asset in the battle to transform efficiency and effectiveness in all areas of their operations.

Moreover, over three quarters of councils point to a lack of in-house skills and resources as a key barrier to better use of information. A similar proportion identify that the few resources they do have are used to gather, cleanse and report on data, rather than analyse it to provide business insight.

These findings perhaps highlight a deliberate but significant omission from the report – ie the role and importance of technology in overcoming the key barriers to transforming information management.

For understandable reasons the Audit Commission chose to focus initially on the need for improvements in culture, people, and process, because addressing these issues is essential to success. Nevertheless councils also need to understand that improvements only in these areas will not be sufficient. They will continue to struggle to control and make sense of the exponential growth in structured and unstructured data while that data resides in a multitude of unrelated databases, or they are reliant on resourcehungry and highly risky ‘spreadsheet proliferation’.

‘Information mature’ industries and the more successful councils have already shifted their IT focus from ‘Technology’ to ‘Information’ and have adopted integrated Business Intelligence and Analytics to automate many of the data capture, cleansing, merging, analysis and dissemination tasks. Research by The Aberdeen Group demonstrates that by doing this they overcome many of the barriers experienced by Local Authorities: they reduce risk and total costs, improve timeliness and reliability of information, and focus scarce resources on turning data into the insight that adds business value. This is also reflected in Gartner’s annual survey of CIOs globally, which for the last 3 years has seen Business Intelligence come out as their top priority because it is acting as the bridge between IT and the business.
However, BI is far lower down the priority list for public sector CIOs, reflecting the lower information management maturity of the sector that has also been identified by a comparison of SAS assessments globally.

More recently, Predictive Analytics has become the growth sector within the Business Intelligence market. Organisations increasingly realise the importance of moving beyond the hindsight provided by traditional BI – which can only improve the reaction time between ‘fail’ and ‘fix’ – and into proactive ‘predict and prevent’. Many public sector policies now put the emphasis on prevention, because it is both more efficient and effective to intervene before rather than after the event, but most public sector organisations have yet to acquire the tools for the job.

Another key trend in information management is for a more shared service approach to information management or even ‘Information-as-a-service’. This is partly due to the scarcity of, and competition for, skilled analyst resource, as well as the pressure on budgets that Local Authorities are experiencing. Smaller Local Authorities in particular may find that harnessing the enhanced security, flexibility and capabilities that can be offered by specialists is more fruitful than trying to go it alone.

Overall, the insights from the Audit Commission report and the tools it provides access to are to be applauded, but local authorities need to be aware that the report is not providing the full picture, nor does it pretend to. It adds to the guidance provided by a wide range of related publications that are either directly or indirectly related to improving information management from both themselves and also bodies as varied as The Knowledge Council, The Cabinet Office, The Treasury and Data Connects. However, although each report has much to commend it in isolation, few cross reference with each other and it can be difficult to connect the dots. Even assuming the target audiencspot each of these publications, they may find it analogous to being sent individual pieces of a jigsaw and being asked to connect them without having sight of the picture on the box. There would appear to be a need for greater coordination and ‘knowledge management’ across the public sector information management community.