Building a “Datadministration” for our century

All along the 20th century, the public sector grew up addressing the challenges of top-down mass-delivery to citizens, equal access and service continuity. The challenge we face now, in our new century, is quite different: it is to form an alliance between the state and its citizens, so that public action is co-produced, personalized, and provides a digital company-like “user experience”. Smart use of data will be central to this endeavor. What does a modern “datadministration” look like? And what can be done to foster its inception?

A largely untapped potential

At a time when debt-burdened national governments are seeking solutions to ensure the ongoing delivery of quality public services, big data and analytics offer considerable, yet largely underexploited, potential. McKinsey Global Institute has quantified this latent value over a five-year period: in 2011, it identified €250 billion in potential savings, at EU-level alone; in 2016, it observed that just 10 to 20% of the savings had actually been captured.

Considerable margins for progress persist in terms of making effective use of data in the public sector. Similar issues can be seen in all European Union countries, and although some countries are leading in specific areas, none can claim to have accomplished the full transition to a mature 'datadministration'. Even in the private sector, most industries have yet to capture more than a small part of the business value of data. The road is long and beset with pitfalls for all, some of which I have described in a recent post.

But the effort is worth it. Beyond budgetary aspects, taking full advantage of big data and analytics could also improve the quality of services delivered to citizens and enhance democratic processes.

Tim O’Reilly describes this with the concept of “government as a plateform” which can be boiled down to three key features: citizen involvement, personalization and the culture of efficiency. All three are underpinned by making more effective use of data.

Data and the city

Let's look first at citizen involvement and co-production of public action. The vitality of innovation in this area – the CivicTechs – today is impressive. In early December, Paris was the venue for the Open Government Partnership Global Summit. With more than 3,000 delegates from hundreds of organizations, more than 80 countries represented and dozens of projects presented, this successful event highlighted a strong desire by civil society to engage in solving pressing public issues. In practical terms, CivicTechs set out to provide citizens with tools for action, by granting them access to public interest data (open data) and inviting them to contribute to public decision-making. One example is provided by the recent French Digital Act (“Loi pour une République numérique"): around 22,000 French citizens submitted suggestions to the www.republique-numerique.fr website, and more than 150,000 votes were cast. Another example: several major cities have kicked off “open budgeting” initiatives in which citizens have their say in how to allocate a proportion of local resources. Israel has launched its own OpenBudget initiative, which introduces full public disclosure of all State budget allocation data via an app. This initiative reinforced the control exercised by the media and civil society. Lastly, in respect of the co-production of public action, we can also point to the predictive policing algorithms that make it possible to forecast areas of high risk and deploy the forces of law and order accordingly. These algorithms draw on police archive data, weather data and posts made by citizens on social media. In this particular case, albeit passive, the contributions of citizens help improve the system’s reliability.

Personalization of services, through data usage, constitutes another 'revolution' in the public sector. In education, for example, it can enable tailored learning content, format and pace to suit the needs and preferences of individual students. Arizona State University and Virginia Commonwealth University have used such a system to boost the student graduation rate through early detection of those struggling to keep up, and offering them extra support. Healthcare and public employment services also offer promising prospects in personalization.

Lastly, data makes it possible to achieve a culture of greater efficiency, since the transparency involved improves the quality of decision-making. Many use cases demonstrate it: by drawing more on data (KPIs, user feedback and sensor-generated data), the State can considerably improve its action. One example: the Defense Ministry of a European state has been able to improve equipment availability as a result of conducting a highly detailed analysis and by restructuring its maintenance operations and spare parts supplier network. But we could also mention smart cities such as Barcelona or Nice. In those cities, through reduced urban traffic congestion, water consumption and power consumption alongside budget economies, their citizens benefit from many advantages generated by optimized urbanization.

A major transformation

So, if the economic and social benefits of datadministration are so promising, how do we explain the fact that progress is so sluggish? The Age of Analytics report by McKinsey provides a number of explanations.

To begin with, we should not underestimate the cultural parameter. 'Co-producing' public services alongside citizens and 'personalizing' them are radically new approaches, making it necessary to convince millions of civil servants that they do not infringe on their mission, but, on the contrary, are the very essence of it today. It would also be impossible to address this point without mentioning the need for autonomy of the civil servants themselves. Innovation must emerge at grassroots level, and enablers of that are same in both the public and private sectors: a detailed understanding of customer/user expectations, lightweight management structure, collaborative working, the right to trial and error, recognition and an incentive to succeed. This is an enormous challenge for leaders, politicians and governments, and a transformation platform for the public sector that is potentially more inspiring than “budgetary discipline”.

We then go on to discuss the silos between governmental bodies. In exactly the same way as in companies, big data reveals its full potential when structured and unstructured data from different sources are cross-referenced. That is the central purpose of Etalab in France, whose cross-functional mission is to encourage governmental bodies, public entities and the various levels of regional and local government to 'open' their data. Last year, Etalab merged with the State’s Information Services Division, a development likely to accelerate further the process of removing internal fences.

Lastly, we should refer to the issue of skills. Those of 'data analysts' and 'data translators' – talent capable of understanding how the data available could add value to a discipline-specific problem – are in high demand and quickly snapped up, including in the private sector. It is by no means clear that the rigid system of career categories, complex career structures and competitive entry examinations will lure these highly skilled individuals in the public sector. More creativity, more flexibility, will be needed to attract them. In France, the government has introduced a 'State startup incubator' and started recruiting 'public interest entrepreneurs' to take on short digital or data-related engagements. Experiments like these will need to be multiplied, adapted and replicated on a much larger scale.

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At several times in our history, the public sector has acted as a driver of innovation and spearhead of economic power, in Western Europe (think reconstruction after WWII), as well as in the US (think Arpanet). The building of a modern 'datadministration' offers an excellent opportunity to continue that tradition.