Data Driven (Powered) Government: Data is new…
The amount of data that Governments collect and process is exploding. IDC Research predicted that the volume of digital data will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 42 percent over the decade of 2010 to 2020. This growth is being driven by an ever-increasing number of sources and the data being generated now is more complex than ever.
As the amount of data in your organization increases, so do the demands on your Government organization to be compliant with legal and regulatory requirements to quickly find, keep and protect data. Spending days to find the specific protected data is not only expensive, it’s not an option.
As internal and external requests and use grows, staying compliant in a sea of evolving global regulations adds new layers of complexity. Policy makers are rapidly adopting new international standards, and security and privacy concerns dominate in an ever-changing global business and social landscape. This is a challenge for any Government organization, large, medium, or small.
Data and Information is a core and vital element every Government operation: we need to protect but also make available the data that is important for Government to create successful end-points.
Lets look at the past: data governance and the processes associated with it have been used for decades to help large organizations and governments manage their data. Governments are extremely sensitive when it comes to the data: not just on classified information, but in general to every type of data that is managed by the Government. Today, issues around stealing and tampering with the data is a growing problem in the world, and discussions around the citizen privacy (especially in EU) and contributing to the complexity.
Moreover, basically all of the Government services today are based on the digital infrastructure — and that one is based on the other vendors and providers that need to carefully work with (and enable) the data that other organizations provide them to store or process. All functions and capabilities built on top of the data is basically what we today call a Government Digital Services and if the data is not the correct one, then there is no quality services in place.
Now, not that we (as a platform and technology provider) are making this more simple: answering the demand for more computing resources and more flexibility, availability, scalability, we are adding new capabilities and platforms where you can store and manage the data — for example, cloud computing. Cloud computing introduces new technical challenges related to what has typically been the domain of information assurance. For example, cloud services are often provided by different CSPs, where control over the data is very frequently shared.
Cloud providers can only address these issues effectively if governments include, as part of their cloud policies, a conscious approach to data governance (and data life cycle, depends on how you want to manage that data).
Effective data life cycle management can help to ensure that data stays within required geo locations (depending on what specific Governments prefers or mandates), which is especially popular with countries that have a stronger, bi or multilateral agreements (EU for example). Data need to be understood also from the value perspective (and value defines also a level of risk). Governments should categorize their data by sensitivity and business impact, considering their relative concerns if data were to be leaked, tampered with, or made unavailable.
Even within a ministry, great variation with regard to data, services, and constituents exists; a Government entity may house groups responsible for military defense or diplomacy in addition to inter-ministerial administrative services, and those entities likely have varying outlooks, not only on how ICT decisions should be approached but also on how their data should be processed and classified.
Finally, the way in which an organization classifies its data or service may change over time, so data governance should be regularly revisited to ensure that organizations continually optimize for cost effectiveness and compliance efficiency.
Data Driven Governments are new series of posts that will dive into the use of data to build new economic value for the governments, citizens and organizations.
More information: “Transforming Government: Cloud Policy Framework for Innovation, Security and Resilience”, Microsoft Corporation
During the day, Ratko works in the Microsoft Corporation as a Public Sector Cloud Services Director. During the night, same thing, but he also finds some time to do other things, most of them sounds like fun. Well, at least to us, 40+ years old people from the sixties.
