Digital Strategy 2022-2025

Workstream 3: Making data work for us

Data is hugely important to us, the information that we gather as part of our daily business, enables us to understand our past performance and current position, but also plan for the future. Data helps us understand our local area and make important decisions that will improve the lives of our local communities.

We are committed to being open and transparent about how we work, our decision-making processes and the services we provide. Making more data available will enable residents and businesses to access information about their area, their community, and the services they access.

We recognise that our departments often work in silos of data, which means that opportunities for insight can often be missed because the data is hard to analyse, isn’t shared within the Council and or with other public services, or isn’t unavailable to us.

The better the data we have the more chance we have in ensuring that services are more targeted and effective, that we allocate resources to where they will have the biggest impact, we save officer time in front and back-office processes, and to provide insight into the issues affecting our local area.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant we are having to make harder decisions at a time when we are unclear of the full impact on our communities. It has also given us the opportunity to be more agile in the way we work as a Council and with data, and we have been able to swiftly develop new skills and demonstrate how essential working with partners to share data is to making informed decisions.

Whatever actions we take moving forward we are committed to always ensuring; data protection principles guide our actions; the data is secure, well organised and fit for purpose and the right people with the right skills are involved.

The intended outcomes for this workstream are:

• Every team has the real time information needed to effectively plan and deliver services, set out in a way that makes it easy to understand and use
• Our data is freely available for anyone to use, whenever this is possible
• We engage with our residents better
• Our people are empowered to share data within and outside the organisation where we can legally do this
• We understand our residents and whole customer base and are able to report and draw on this information to make informed decisions
• We use the better information we have to make design services around our users that are more personalised, streamlined and efficient
• The burden for staff of dealing with information requests is reduced

To achieve this we will:

• Design an open data website and deliver a programme of work to publish more data
• Undertake a dashboard development programme, working with every team to set up dashboards containing the information they need
• Review the performance management framework
• Ensure that information and record management is at the heart of Microsoft 365 migration project
• Work with key partners on opportunities to collect and share data with service improvement and data protection in mind
• Review how we deliver analytics across the organisation to ensure we are making the best use of our resources
• Build on the work done using predictive analytics to prevent people becoming homeless, exploring where this can be used in other areas to benefit residents and businesses