Building A Data-Informed Council | Peak Indicators
The National Data Strategy calls for local authorities to become more data-informed: making decisions from more trusted insight and using resources most effectively. But how do local councils go about achieving this vision?
Paul Clough of Peak Indicators explains what a data-informed council is, the infrastructure needed to start generating insights from data and the best first-use cases for data science that drive immediate value.
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Paul Clough, Head of Data Science and AI
We often use this term data-driven. I guess I’m not entirely in favour of it, because actually I think — particularly in local government — what we want to be data-informed. What we want to do is empower and give decision makers as much information, as much evidence as we can, to make good decisions.
The organisations that are data driven, that are analytical, that embrace and change the way that they do things internally to make better use of data and the outcomes of analysing that data, are the ones that are able to compete.
Nathan Makalena
Do you see some of them gathering data already to start on their journey?
Paul Clough
Yeah, a lot of councils are perhaps quite early on in that journey. Other ones are actually making really advanced use of data analytics, data science, and so on. So I don’t think they’re necessarily behind in local government. But I do think that actually, in any organisation, if you don’t get your foundations in place first, it does make it very difficult to kind of progress and carry on that journey.
Nathan Makalena
What would you say are the ideal first projects for councils?
Paul Clough
There’s often a tendency to sort of have the most ambitious projects as your first example. Of using AI or machine learning or analytics. We’ve seen that it can often end in failure, partly because it’s just too ambitious.
The place to start is that really that low hanging fruit, you know, looking for use cases that get you good return on value (so they’re important to the business), they’re kind of key use cases (they could make a difference), but also that they’re achievable as well.
So they might not be the most glamorous, they may not be the most exciting, but if you could produce a report that brought together a number of data sources that could actually help, for example, someone like a social worker in the day-to-day decisions they make (which are often really complex decisions — very, very difficult decisions). Those would be the places to start because you could really make a difference to those workers, and the people that those workers are looking to support. As opposed to just jumping in and saying, ‘right, let’s create this really, you know, sort of advanced analytics predictive analytics project.’ Yeah, it may be great to do, but maybe that’s further down the line.
Originally published at https://www.peakindicators.com on December 12, 2022.
