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No agile working without a data strategy

There’s no doubt about it: an agile government needs a constant supply of data. To deliver that data, you need IT that can handle users’ and clients’ changing needs, requirements and preferences. This is where a digital data strategy comes in.

For an agile government, dynamic IT and data are crucial because new regulations, public services, initiatives and practices are like ‘countries’ in the world of digital information systems. If the systems are difficult to adapt, then you can’t implement policies rapidly. Citizens then get frustrated and staff can no longer do their jobs properly. This is still the case with much older, legacy IT within governments, which prevents governments from becoming agile – particularly risky for large government organisations that face a lot of political and social upheaval.

The right data

Getting the right data is a basic step to working towards an agile government. Data provides insights into changes that are unfolding in society. It helps us formulate effective laws and regulations. And data is also needed to implement these effectively. So, it’s crucial to have data in the right place at the right time. And to do that, a clear-cut data strategy is imperative.

Reasons for a data strategy

There are several reasons why you should create a data strategy:

  • Data comes in all shapes, sizes and states (see below). You need to know how your organisation wants to deal with it.

  • Using data comes with risks. Just think of processing personal data. So, it’s essential to identify the data you are using so you can put effective risk management and information security measures in place.

  • Data is increasingly being shared outside of organisations. This creates both opportunities and risks. With the emergence of APIs, a data strategy is your bedrock for ensuring that data is of the right quality. If you use automated sharing when there is incorrect or incomplete data in a chain, this can cause a host of problems further down the line.

Different forms of data

When using data, we can differentiate between various ‘states’:

  • Data-in-use: data that forms part of the daily data flow in organisations performing government duties. This data often comes from and concerns citizens and businesses and is needed to make the right decisions (e.g. granting a permit or allocating a grant).

  • Data-in-rest: data that delivers the knowledge needed to process the data-in-use correctly. This often involves legislation and regulations that need to be translated into knowledge models, algorithms and digital code so they can be implemented and adapted more quickly. For an agile government, it is particularly important that this data-in-rest is not frozen. Ideally, the data can flow in a stable and reliable way. And accurate information is needed for this too.

  • Data-in-transit: data in between systems and/or organisations. With data-in-transit, it’s especially important to pay attention to the format, protocols and security.

Frozen data

Frozen data can be found in rigid, existing IT systems that once had a place in a world that was stable and changed slowly. But in this day and age, agility is everything. Your IT systems need to be able to use new knowledge by turning data-in-rest into a format readable by both human and machine: knowledge models that can be read, created and controlled with the right tools by experts in the field.

Thanks to dynamic information provision within your composable enterprise architecture, you can then use these knowledge models to process the data-in-use.

This way of thinking requires a change in the way you deliver the new data. Think of it like two sides of a zip, brought seamlessly together:

A business-driven process that delivers knowledge about the implementation of laws and regulations to knowledge models.

With clear traceability back to these laws and regulations as well as the data as it flows through the information systems.

An IT-driven process that brings together stable infrastructural IT components into a data-processing platform, under the design of the composable enterprise architecture.

See ‘Deliver change with an agile production process’ to learn more.

Would you like more information on this topic? Get in touch.

Let's talk

Dennis Struyk

Director Public

dennis.struyk@ordina.nl

+31 6 3100 5583