There's a data confidence gap in government

Throughout the Digital Excellence Programme courses, we are asking learners about their insights to key digital and data issues in government. We've summarised the key takeaways from these converstaions - you can read more here.

Key takeaways:

• Leaders are ready to embrace a more data-driven future for government
• Building capability and confidence is the essential first step

Two of the learning objectives for the Data Culture course are:

• helping learners understand the benefits of better data sharing across government;
• and supporting learners to instil a more data curious culture within their teams.

The volume of data which departments and agencies generate is vast. That data has the potential to reveal powerful new insights which can help solve some of the biggest policy and operational challenges facing government.

The problem is that the data is hard to collect, store, standardise and share. And even if you get that right, having lots of data is not much use if it’s not fed into decision-making processes.

We asked learners to share their perspective on some of these issues throughout the course, these are some of the key insights from those discussions.

Exciting and essential: the future of data in government

We started by asking learners to tell us how they feel about making data a core part of their team’s strategy.

As the word cloud below shows, the most prominent results were positive: leaders feel excited about the potential, they think it’s an essential step and some feel confident in their ability to make it happen. However, there were also concerns: a sense of nervousness, being unprepared or unqualified.

Building on why some leaders are excited by the potential, we also asked them to lay out what they see as the potential benefits of better data sharing between departments. The answers show the potential for improvements to both the systematic functioning of government, as well as policy outcomes for the public. Key themes included:

• Operational efficiency: With better access to shared data, departments could learn from each other's efficiencies and apply best practices. This also includes more targeted operational delivery, strategic workforce planning, and holding suppliers accountable.
• Better people management: More shared data could enable better talent management across the civil service, with career histories and capabilities being better understood and utilised. Shared data on diversity, equity and inclusion statistics could help build a more diverse talent pipeline.
• Better policy decision-making: Data sharing could enable more informed decision-making. This is particularly noticeable in the areas of health, infrastructure, transport, and environmental policy. Sharing data could help in understanding behaviour patterns, resource allocation, cost-effective methods, and managing the impacts of policy decisions.

Building data confidence is a key challenge

At the end of the course, we ask learners to lead a discussion with their teams about the key ideas and themes they’ve covered. The aim of the exercise is to help learners influence their colleagues to be more data curious. We ask them to share their reflections on these discussions and characterise their team’s sentiment toward data in an online discussion with their peers.

Their responses show that the case for why data matters is well-understood across government. However, they also reveal the gaps in capability and confidence which are holding teams back from using data more effectively.

Another learner echoed the sentiment, saying that while her colleagues were convinced that collecting more data was a good thing, her junior colleagues need more support to ask the right questions and identify the ‘so what’ from data.

The point about providing support to junior colleagues highlights the importance of leaders, both in asking for data (and then challenging the analysis) and leading by example and demonstrating that becoming more confident with data is a learning process.

Building a more data driven government is not just a technical challenge, it’s a cultural one, too. Senior leaders, like the rest of their colleagues, need space and support to develop their capability and build their confidence.