Governance, enablement and mentoring are key to finding solutions for data challenges, writes Matt Wicks, co-CEO for technology and innovation at The Virtual Forge
Data is at the heart of the solutions for a multitude of problems facing the public sector, but using it successfully often involves its own problems.
It is something of a cliché but highly appropriate to say these are often people problems than technology problems, with people having set up data in a way that makes it difficult to manage and share.
Finding the solutions requires collaboration, between people and across organisations. It comes down to a focus on enabling people to own and manage their own data.
The Virtual Forge has an expertise in this area, having worked with organisations in the public and private sectors to deliver data and AI solutions to solving problems, with a strong emphasis on equipping them with the skills to meet the challenge themselves thereafter.
There are three tranches to our approach to this knowledge transfer, covering governance, enablement and mentoring.
Demands of governance
Getting the governance right enables an organisation to identify proper use cases, link them to communities and specific data elements and assign responsibilities to data owners, going down to a granular level. But it can be hard to get it right in large scale data and AI projects, in which people may be excited about the outcomes but struggle to grasp the details of the processes to deliver these.
To help them over this we work with the Data Workbench tool to enable the building of data communities within an organisation. It makes it possible to simplify the governance in using data, build communities, identify the value and measure and improve the usage.
We use it to help an organisation understand all the use cases for its data, and appoint stewards to own and manage the different elements with a view to producing and managing the outputs.
It also contributes to the enablement by providing an understanding of how the data can be used to lead to successful outcomes, generally making it more comprehensible and manageable.
A big part of this is in the consistency of reporting. This is sometimes lacking in projects, but it is possible to set up guidelines for the delivery of information, and provide toolsets and templates that are easy to work with to ensure that the data is easy for stakeholders and decision makers to understand. In turn, this helps to provide a common framework for understanding, which reinforces the collaboration in a project.
Building skills
It is important to build the in-house skills to do this over the long term. We can support this as a trusted partner, with mentoring programmes that could be a short time every week, or concentrated at the start of a project and followed up by the availability of one of our people to provide support when needed.
This can be especially important for small organisations without any specialist data scientists. We help them discover functions within tools that they commonly have access to, such as PowerBI, that raise their capability in using data. By using these in a smart way it is possible to set up existing data to deliver new insights and support new services. This is making what you have do more.
The big benefit in all this is that it gives the client organisation the capability to carry out the project internally, and build its capability for future projects. It is basically about doing the bulk of the work for yourself.
Haringey achievement
Our work with the London Borough of Haringey provides an example of what can be achieved.
The council wanted to set up a dynamic system for parking charges that was able to adjust pricing based on real-time factors such as location, the weather, emission levels of a car, local traffic and whether or not the vehicle owner was a resident. We worked with the council, using the data it had, to build a model for dynamic pricing across the borough, and after providing the initial help stepped away, but remain available for any future support.
The Virtual Forge is able to apply and share relevant learnings from such projects to others in the sector, with services including data consulting, AI development, PowerBI consultancy and data visualistion.
We help organisations to solve their data problems themselves but are available as a trusted partner in the long term. We help you to own, understand and manage data as a foundation to finding solutions.
If you have any questions or would like to schedule a chat, feel free to book a time with us here
Catch up with Matt's presentation to UKAuthority's AI & Data4Good conference below
