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How 1Integrate can be used by Defra and its Arm’s Length Bodies

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How 1Integrate can be used by Defra and its Arm’s Length Bodies

Multiyear call-off contract with Defra

On 20th June 2022 1Spatial commenced a multiyear 1Integrate G-Cloud 12 call-off contract with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The contract enables Defra and its Arm’s Length Bodies (please refer to Annex A below) to license 1Integrate through the call-off contract.

Read the full press release

Defra and its Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) are responsible for improving and protecting the environment. They aim to grow a green economy and sustain thriving rural communities. They support our world-leading food, farming, and fishing industries.

Defra and its ALBs use data to power decision making. The government actively looks to support data owners and data managers to assess, communicate and improve data quality to ensure the decisions that people make are done so based on data that is well known, understood and fit-for-purpose. Proactively managing this process means that you can be confident in what you do with your data, and effective in your work. Data is critical to delivering outcomes for citizens and value for money for taxpayers. High-quality, timely and robust data are a foundational pillar for Defra and its ALBs. Granular data are essential for improving and protecting the environment and tailoring policies.

Data Quality Action Plans

Data Quality Action Plans are a government recommended way to baseline how fit your data is for its intended purpose. Regular reviews are also encouraged to monitor changes in the quality of your data, and allow you to put time and effort to improve the quality of your data when you discover that you need to.

Rules are a great way to help you efficiently develop and maintain your Data Quality Actions Plans. They are a great way to assess if your data’s compliant to the quality levels that you need to effectively support your decision-making processes. They also become an independent way to catalogue what checks are performed on your data so that you can be communicate it to all your users. This allows you to be clear with everyone about the context you have used to determine that your data is fit for purpose.

What is a Rules Engine?

A Rules Engine (software application) is, at its core, is a mechanism for executing business and technical rules to a dataset. Business and technical rules are simple statements that encode business decisions of some kind. It provides a true or false result depending on whether the input data matches that rule. Rules have always been considered a part of Artificial Intelligence although in a rules-based system the rules are explicitly defined by experts rather than being automatically inferred from possible subtle patterns in data.

Another advantage of a rules-based approach is you can then encode your rules so that they can be automated, allowing you to assess the quality of your data regularly and consistently on an on-going basis, looking for trends over time. The automation of these tasks can save you a lot of time and resources.

1Integrate is 1Spatial’s patented rules engine which can help you design, develop, test and then put your Data Quality Actions Plans into production. Its no-code development environment allows you to create business rules to automatically transform, validate, correct, and integrate your spatial and non-spatial enterprise data.

Find out more about how 1Spatial’s rules engine works and the key benefits.

How could Defra and its ALBs use 1Integrate’s Rules Engine

Defra and its ALBs have a responsibility for setting and monitoring polices, regulations, business goals, best practices, and performance. These requirements can be expressed by rules using 1Integrate.

  1. Initiate Your Data Governance Framework
    An important requirement for Defra and its ALBs is regulatory scrutiny. Non-compliance can result in penalties and business disruption. Defra and its ALBs must keep track of internal policies and local and international industry regulations. 1Integrate can improve compliance by making rules-based processes transparent, as well as automating tasks to ensure they are auditable and traceable. It’s no-code environment means that Defra and its ALBs can quickly make necessary changes to business processes so that Defra can effectively respond to changing regulatory policies.

  2. Centralise Your Enterprise Rules
    1Integrate provides a central location for storing business and technical ontologies, rules, and process definitions as well as an archive of data processing reports. Information in the library be shared easily across the enterprise and re-used across multiple projects via APIs, allowing you to create an enterprise rules library for data management and data governance purposes.

  3. Discover Your Data Quality Rules
    Defra and its ALBs can use 1Integrate to set out the data quality rules in their Data Quality Action Plans that their data must follow to ensure it is fit for purpose. Rules for data quality should align with user needs and business objectives. Using the 1Integrate no-code development environment to create your quality rules means you can rapidly prototype and test your rules to validate that they are both realistically declarative and achievable.

  4. Validate and Assess Your Data Using Your Quality Rules
    1Integrate provides the environment that allows you to integrate different disparate data sources into your quality rules and execute those rules to get the results back about which records comply, or fail to comply. This means you get a measurement of data quality dimensions. Data quality dimensions are measurable characteristics of data quality. For example, you may have a rule for timeliness which states that data must be entered into your database within three days of collection. Data must conform to this rule to be considered ‘timely’, and the timeliness of the data can be measured against this rule. Read more about a rules based approach to data validation and continuous data improvement.

  5. Correct and Enhance Your Data Using Your Quality Rules
    Defra and its ALBs can use 1Integrate to improve data quality, by creating business rules for data correction in their Data Quality Action Plans. 1Integrate rules are extendable into pluggable actions, which will allow Defra and its ALBs to reconcile data issues or enhance data.

  6. Monitor and Improve Your Data
    The effort to improve data and make better business decision should be an ongoing practice as part of continuous monitoring and improvement initiatives. Defra and its ALBs can use 1Integrate to continually monitor and improve data. Once rules are set, 1Integrate provides views on data, for example metrics, KPIs and dashboards. It becomes easier to look for new areas to improve data using these views. It also becomes easier to implement optimisations to data processes.

Annex A: Arm’s Length Bodies include:

Non-ministerial department

Executive agency

Executive non-departmental public body

Advisory non-departmental public body

Tribunal

Other

1Integrate

1Integrate is a no-code development environment that allows you to create business rules to automatically transform, validate, correct, and integrate your spatial and non-spatial enterprise data.

Find out more