Establishing Effective Government Data Infrastructures
Making data easier not harder to work with…
I recently read an article from Open Data Science about how city governments need to establish effective data infrastructures, a foundation for digital success and provisioning of digital services for the public good. The article focused on the City of San Diego. I found the article very insightful and particularly liked the phrase “data should never be extra work – it should make your work easier”. City of San Diego Chief Data Officer Maksim Pecherskiy was hired in late 2014. Pecherskiy helped build the city’s data portal to make government data available and easily usable for programmers, city officials, and the general public – all to help create an effective data infrastructure.
To establish any government data infrastructure, Pecherskiy said teams must do the following:
- Determine their approach
- Decide what policies are in place and what policies should be changed
- Determine what the data collection and use process is and how it should be changed
- Work with the people who work with the data and with subject matter experts
- Connect to the data source(s)
- Build a middleware (to transfer information between the data source and interface)
- Provide an interface for people and policymakers to use
A smart and sustainable data infrastructure is critical to powering data-driven decision making across the City of San Diego.
London Office of Technology and Innovation
The recently formed London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) is a collaborative vehicle intended to strengthen London Borough’s ability to innovate, build common capability and to scale-up digital innovation across London’s public services. LOTI has identified that one of the key barriers to city-wide digital collaboration is weak data foundations. Public services throughout London use and manage data in different ways meaning that LOTI requires master data infrastructures to help enable city-wide collaboration and digital success.
Our approach to Establishing an Effective Data Infrastructure
Government organisations across the world want data to make life easier, not harder when used as part of digital systems. Examples across the world show that data-driven decision making is having positive impacts on sustainability, inequality, resilience, growth and well-being outcomes. To sustain these impacts, organisations need to establish and continually evolve effective data infrastructures for collecting and maintaining, mastering and sharing trustworthy data.
1Spatial’s approach to evolving data infrastructures follows learning by doing, overcoming by sharing and succeeding together through data Collaboration, data Automation, data Transformation and data Visualisation principles for data (geospatial) infrastructures.
- Data Collaboration – working with employees and stakeholders internally and externally to share data management responsibilities
- Data Automation – designing and implementing automated workflows to manage and share data
- Data Transformation – making digital data fit for purpose by transferring data between data source(s) and target interface(s)
- Data Visualisation – making digital data accessible for people and decision-makers to use
Ensuring Positive Impacts from Data
Sustainable positive impacts from data must be built on smart data of an appropriate quality that is transparent, defined and measured. The above collaboration, automation, transformation and visualisation principles enable organisations to establish effective data infrastructures and a foundation for digital success.
1Spatial makes data easier not harder to work with, by working with people who work with data, applying processes and technology for example; 1Data Gateway, 1Integrate, FME and Geocortex.
1Spatial’s solutions for geospatial data infrastructures can make data easier not harder to work with by data collaboration, automation, transformation and visualisation capabilities across your geospatial estate. 1Spatial adopt a digital by default approach and apply data engineering and agile capabilities to tie together critical layers of geospatial data so that government digital records match and maintain a representation of the physical world for data-driven decision making and ensuring positive impacts from data. For further information refer to 1Spatial’s government industry web page.
Are you establishing an effective data infrastructure, making data easier not harder to work with?
Author – Matthew White, 1Spatial
Open Data Science - Establishing an Effective Data Infrastructure