Socitm Blog

Since coming to power, the Coalition Government has made a flurry of announcements about open and transparent government and as a member of the Local Data Panel, I strongly support this initiative, but I am also mindful that these policies do not come without some unintended side effects, however well intentioned. 

I raise these concerns with some trepidation, because 'nay' sayers will be branded as 'opposed to open government', and clearly, the benefits are undoubted - transparency will drive improved data quality, it will expose poor practice and inefficiency, and it will generate new uses for information currently not possible.

However, systems will have to be redesigned and reports written to ensure the information can be extracted from finance systems, and this has to be done not only in an automated fashion, but also in a way that ensures sensitive data does not inadvertently get published.

For example, payments are made to foster carers, and these will have to be extracted from finance systems or we risk the criticism which is quite understandable when the public sector inadvertently leaks large amounts of sensitive information.

One of the other concerns of local public services will be the amount of time spent in dealing with spurious comparisons made by the public, press and pressure groups when trying to link data across different areas.  Over time this problem will go away as information sets are better harmonised and their basis consolidated, but in the short term it will add pressure and cost.

Publishing more freedom of information requests and responses openly on the web will help to avoid some of this, but responding to every question about how much is spent on biscuits is also a waste of scarce public sector resource.

There are other issues that need to be dealt with.  For example, I am aware of organisations that have outsourced their IT and are now finding it difficult to easily extract the data they want from externally managed systems, either because of the cost, or because they no longer have the in-house skills.  These sort of issues of course are never considered in out-sourcing arrangements, and it is my personal view that public service organisations must retain strong information management expertise and control in-house over core applications.

It is also arguably going to be harder for larger organisations despite the fact they have resources to deploy, given the volume of transactions and data that they manage.  Some of this pain and cost can be ameliorated if pressure is brought to bear on suppliers to develop standard reporting routines from common systems (eg. SAP and Oracle), that automatically extract the data required in the right format.

Guidance is also going to be needed.  For example, how should aggregated expenditure (or more importantly dis-aggregated expenditure) be dealt with?

A contract for £3,000 is actually paid for in chunks of £300 may fall below the £500 limit, but the intention would be to make the contract and payments evident.  Guidance on format of outputs would also be helpful, especially if there is any risk of having to re-work data into a new format.

Overall, I believe local authorities will be positive about the need for openness.  Concerns will be practical ones about how to do this in a way that affects the public and does not introduce new costs at a time of severe economy measures.  There will not be a default view that 'this is a bad thing', just concerns about how to do it properly.

Socitm is evaluating what we can do to support our members in dealing with this fast developing agenda, but as a first step, we have created a Community of Practice on the IDeA's platform (www.communities.idea.gov.uk ) called The Local Open Data Project.

The Community builds on one developed for the Open Election Data Project that we ran in association with the LGA and OpenlyLocal. There was a lot of learning from that project which can be accessed in the Community and is highly relevant to the wider open data agenda.

The Community will enable discussion and knowledge-sharing on all aspects of open and linked data, transparency and publishing of local public information, and related topics.

We'll be adding content to the Community in the coming days and weeks so please get involved yourself and encourage colleagues to do so to.