The Data Conversation: the Open Data Institute and the UK National Data Strategy
By Jeni Tennison
3 December 2020
Update from D&P Blog Admin: Since the posting of this blog, the UK National Data Strategy team at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have extended the consultation deadline. The Open Data Institute has taken this opportunity to made the outline of its response available for public feedback. Read this Twitter thread @ODIHQ for more details.
26 November 2020
The challenge of a data strategy
Strategies are one of those things that are both important to do, and difficult to do well. They need to capture people’s imagination, clearly articulate the difference between where we are and where we want to be, and lay out the set of coherent activities that will bridge that gap. And they need to do this and be implementable in the context of change and an uncertain future.
Data strategies — whether for businesses, civil society organisations, and governments — present a further set of challenges. The growing availability and use of data is catalysing the development of a set of disruptive and transformative digital technologies and increasing automation. But it’s difficult to be sure what the impacts of these technologies will be, or the timeline for them to reach full maturity.
For governments, who need to think about impact at a society- and economy-wide scale, the growing availability of data is creating new markets, enabling data-savvy companies and governments to operate in new ways, shifting power relationships and creating new risks and harms. Data is a general purpose technology that touches every aspect of our lives, societies and economies, something we are all aware of and encounter every time we dismiss a cookie notice.
But the evidence base for creating a data strategy — what has been tried, what has been effective and what has failed — is uneven in breadth, depth, quality and rigour. Research and pilots from one context might not necessarily translate to another; a digital technology that was considered a trailblazer in 2018 might, by 2020, be considered irrelevant or near-obsolete, or it might have stalled completely and not achieved breakthrough status. In the same time-frame, a digital tech start-up that was considered niche might be on its way to becoming an industry trend-setter. Even if it were not always shifting, global leaders — as the UK has the ambition to be in data — cannot always walk on well-trodden ground.
This, though, is the challenge that the National Data Strategy team within the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has taken on. The intention to deliver a national data strategy “to unlock the power of data across government and the wider economy, while building trust in its use” was originally announced in June 2018 by the then DCMS Secretary of State, Matthew Hancock. In a reflection of the turbulence felt across the country over the last two and a half years, the commitment — and team — has weathered four Secretaries of State, a general election, a machinery-of-government change (with responsibility for government use of data moving back to the Cabinet Office) and the significant work and disruption of no-deal Brexit preparations and Covid-19 response.
With this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the result is a “framework strategy”, launched for consultation on 9th September 2020, with the consultation closing on 2nd December. In his speech at the ODI Summit in November 2020, the Minister for Media and Data, John Whittingdale, described it as “an invitation to all the people who are taking part in our discussion today to contribute to the drawing up of the more detailed strategy”. We are nearing the end of the beginning.
The emphasis on consultation, conversation and discussion is in keeping with the approach of the National Data Strategy team, which has always had the ambition of open and engaged policy making, including a call for evidence and 22 roundtables during 2019. The timing also straddles the November 25th Spending Review; we can imagine another reason for the focus to be on a framework-with-examples rather than a coherent and detailed roadmap of activities is the need to avoid making spending commitments until after the financial settlement to support them was nailed down.
Thinking outside the framework
The ODI has been exploring public policy around data since its foundation in 2012, and has, over that time, generated a lot of material on these topics. Consultations are often useful opportunities to pull these pockets of policy thinking together, but they have the disadvantage of being framed around the way the government thinks. Some important responses to a strategy are not about the content but about what’s missing.
So we were keen, while creating our response, to give ourselves opportunities to think beyond the framework specified in the National Data Strategy, and to stimulate similar thinking across the rest of the data community. We have done this through a portfolio of creative thinking and collaborative working, including a series of blog posts about how we think the ODI’s manifesto for an open, trustworthy data ecosystem could be realised in a national data strategy, a mapping tool of the National Data Strategy framework strategy to help other organisations and people prepare their own responses, and “Getting data right: perspectives on the UK National Data Strategy 2020” — a summary note of an autumn event series convened in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute, the Centre for Public Data, the Institute for Government and the Royal Statistical Society.
I also created a set of long reads in which I wanted to consider the details that will need to be in the next version of the strategy, and the challenges the government will encounter as it takes the National Data Strategy implementation forward. It is easy to identify things that aren’t working well around data; slightly harder to set a vision for a world in which it works better; and a real challenge to identify concrete steps, within the reach and resources of the UK government, that can shift the dial. We need as a community to properly explore these options, pragmatically, as the framework of the National Data Strategy gets fleshed out into a concrete and funded plan of activity.
I focused these long reads on three areas:
- Data to support policy-making (July 2020)– an area where the centre of government has a large amount of interest, illustrated by Michael Gove’s Ditchley lecture which emphasised the need for government to be “rigorous and fearless in its evaluation of policy and projects”.
- The future of data protection in the UK (August 2020)– a topic of particular concern as we exit the European Union and gain more control over our data protection laws. Thinking in the data community on the governance of personal data is evolving rapidly, and there are both opportunities to try new approaches and huge risks — particularly to more vulnerable groups in our societies — from taking an unwise path.
- Data for the wider economy (November 2020) — a subject that often gets caught up in high profile concerns such as adtech, the role of the big digital platforms, and the potential of AI, while overlooking the real different data can make to day-to-day business operations and people’s lives.
One big topic I didn’t get to — at least so far — is on the role of data in the delivery of (digital) public services. This is an important topic for many reasons — the personalisation of GOV.UK; the growing role of data in decision making about individuals lives, as highlighted by the experience of A level and GCSE students over the summer; and the big questions that have been raised about the impact of the digital welfare state on the most vulnerable people and communities. No doubt this is something I will return to.
I created these long reads as drafts, published in Google Docs and shared on social media, and invited public comment on them, for several reasons, rooted in ODI’s open, collaborative and iterative way of working. First, I believe that the collective intelligence of the community is far far greater than mine, or ODIs, and I wanted to harness and learn from it. Second, I know that it is easier to respond to something than to create something — we have all faced the terror of the blank page — so I hoped that by having something to react to would help stimulate alternative ideas. Third, I wanted to specifically test the ideas I had, and importantly how to articulate them, to see where they caused confusion or were misinterpreted so that I could refine them and the way I talk about them.
Fortunately, the data community is generous with its opinions, particularly back in July when I published the first long read. Comments have included everything from niggles over the choices of particular words through to generalised exhortations to think differently. The most valuable exchanges are those between readers, agreeing, disagreeing or building on each others’ points. The benefit of collaborative documents — in contrast to the usual form of government consultation — is that those responding get to debate with each other and, hopefully, a consensus emerge.
Keeping the conversation going
As I said, we are nearing the end of the beginning of the creation of the UK’s National Data Strategy. The next stage for the DCMS team is the creation of more detailed plans that the government can take forward into implementation.
After the New Year I’ll be taking some time to reflect on the feedback that the long reads received, how to incorporate or follow-up on some of the really interesting commentary from readers, whether I’ll add any more pieces to the series, and whether or how to formally publish the pieces that I’ve circulated so far. I’d like it to remain a conversation, though, so please take a look at what others have commented.
I’d also encourage you to similarly explore and lay out what you think government should practically do — in terms of investment, legislation or other activities — to move us, step by step, from where we are to where we need to be.
In the meantime, at the Open Data Institute we’ll be drawing on some of these ideas and evidence to use in our formal response to the National Data Strategy framework strategy consultation. I hope that they will similarly prove useful to you in yours.
About the author:
Jeni Tennison is Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser at the Open Data Institute. She gained a PhD in AI from the University of Nottingham, then worked as an independent consultant, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, before joining the ODI as Technical Director in 2012, becoming CEO in 2016, and Vice President in 2020.
She served on the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group from 2011 to 2015 and co-chaired the W3C’s CSV on the Web Working Group. She also sits on the Advisory Board for the Open Contracting Partnership; the Board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data; the UK’s Health Tech Advisory Board; and advises the Board of OpenUK.
