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David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful, suggested that instead of thinking about data like oil, we should rather think of it like soil. Data is a fertile environment from which good things might happen.
But just like soil, it is something you have to nurture and care for if you want it to give you a good return.
And this is where we start our second section – if we’re in roles with responsibility for building a data-driven public sector then we need to think about our job in terms of farming. We need to be mindful that when it comes to data our job is to make good soil and nurture data-driven ways of working.
Unless otherwise indicated or an obvious screenshot, the images were generated by ChatGPT.
So let’s start with understanding the transformative potential of data in delivering public value.
The volume of data we generate and the importance we place on it is growing exponentially, but the critical question is: how effectively are we harnessing this data?
In 2010 the world as a whole generated 2 zettabytes of data. Last year that figure was put at a staggering 120 zettabytes of data. To put that in some perspective, one zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes.
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My name’s Ben Welby and I’ve spent 15 years working in and around digital transformation starting off in local government, then helping to build and launch GOV.UK, and most recently at the OECD.
Today we’re going to be looking at the three aspects of building a data-driven public sector:
This is arguably a seminal piece in the landscape of thinking about ‘digital government’. This Policy Framework provides the analytical foundation to the work that the OECD’s Digital Government and Data Unit performs with it providing the basis for structuring Digital Government Reviews and, perhaps crucially, offering the intellectual foundations for the forthcoming Digital Government Index and the efforts to measure digital government maturity around the world.
This framework is a joint effort with different members of the team contributing different chapters and Barbara providing the overall leadership to splice those efforts together. I’m quite proud to have contributed the chapter on Government as a Platform, which is a subject close to my heart (and one I first wrote about on this blog back in 2012),
The Six Pillars of Digital Government: Foundations for the Future
The OECD’s Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPF) is much more than a set of guidelines; it’s the foundation for how governments across the world can reimagine public service delivery in the digital age.
Why Digital Government Needs Six Dimensions
Governments are facing increasing demands to be agile, transparent, and responsive. The framework’s six dimensions – Digital by Design, Data-Driven Public Sector, Government as a Platform, Open by Default, User-Driven, and Proactiveness – provide the basis for public sectors to achieve these goals. These dimensions don’t stand alone; they are interdependent and essential for creating a government that is fit for the digital era.
Digital by Design: The heart of digital transformation is embedding digital in every aspect of government from the outset. This isn’t about bolting on technology to outdated processes; it’s about creating a strategic and systematic approach to policy-making, using digital as the backbone for every stage of government operations.
Data-Driven Public Sector: Governments must recognise data as a critical asset. This dimension underscores the importance of data governance, ethical use, and openness. Data is more than a by-product; it is a core driver of how policies are formulated, monitored, and evaluated.
Government as a Platform: Government as a platform moves away from siloed services and towards a more ecosystem-based approach. By creating reusable tools, services, and infrastructure, governments can empower service teams to focus on the unique needs of their users, driving both innovation and efficiency.
Open by Default: Open government data, open decision-making processes, and transparency are key to creating trust and accountability. This dimension calls on governments to make openness the default setting, ensuring that public information is accessible and useful.
User-Driven: Services should be designed with the user in mind, not based on the convenience of government structures. This dimension emphasizes the importance of designing services based on real user needs and ensuring that they are accessible, inclusive, and responsive.
Proactiveness: Governments shouldn’t wait for citizens to come to them—they should anticipate needs and provide services proactively. Whether it’s using data to predict service demands or creating channels for continuous user feedback, proactiveness is about making government services as seamless as those in the private sector.
What Comes Next?
These six dimensions are not static. They are the foundation for the ongoing digital transformation that every government must go through. The OECD’s Digital Government Index is the next step, providing a quantitative measure of how well countries are performing across these dimensions. The framework will also continue to evolve, just as we must evolve our approach to digital government.
This paper presents the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPF), a policy instrument to help governments identifying key determinants for effective design and implementation of strategic approaches to transition towards higher levels of digital maturity of their public sectors. This analytical work builds on the provisions of the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies and supports the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the Secretariat across countries and individual projects.
The DGPF provides the ground for peer reviews and frames the design of the methodology and the OECD Survey on Digital Government to measure countries’ digital government maturity across the six dimensions covered in this Framework: digital by design, data-driven public sector, government as a platform, open by default, user-driven and proactiveness. The document is enriched with countries’ practices to illustrate the concepts covered in each of the six dimensions of the DGPF.
This paper was a team effort under my leadership with Arturo contributing the chapter on data governance, Lucia working on data for trust and my developing the introduction, conclusion and the material around data for public value.
The bones of the framework are being used in our Digital Government Reviews and it is our hope that you could take the 12 elements of the framework and apply it into any context. Indeed, there are two appendices to the report that, thanks to our colleagues Gavin and Daniel, apply the framework to the context of 1) integrity actors and 2) human resources.
It introduces country-level practices and insights provided by several OECD member countries that contribute to the E-Leaders Thematic Group on Data
It uses those insights to develop a framework setting out the steps that countries need to take in order to build out an effective approach to the data-driven public sector
With ‘Data-driven public sector’ being one of the six elements which we argue form the basis for digital government maturity it is incredibly important for governments to address all the elements that go into achieving maturity in this regard.
To that end the framework consists of three pillars:
Pillar 1: Governance: we cast the vision for ‘governance’ wider than legislation, regulation and responsibility for data which is what people tend to understand this means. We argue that effective governance involves strategy (leadership), tactics (implementation and rules) and delivery (infrastructure and architecture).
Pillar 2: Public value: the point of putting data to work is to meet user needs and deliver societal value. We draw on country practices to show how important data is to looking ahead to future (anticipating and planning), responding to immediate needs (delivery), and then understanding what can be learnt from the past (evaluation and monitoring).
Pillar 3: Public trust: it is far easier to lose trust than it is to build it. That means governments need to be thinking about all the ways in which the use of data could undermine public trust. We explore dimensions of ethics, privacy, consent, transparency and digital security.
In our work we find that governments may hive off different elements of this under different organisations and while they may have good plans and practices in place, often there is not a holistic and strategic overarching sense of how these elements interact. The starting point has to be strong strategic leadership, but that leadership must be mindful that there’s almost nothing that can be achieved with data in the public sector without making public trust the guiding priority.
The blurb
Twenty-first century governments must keep pace with the expectations of their citizens and deliver on the promise of the digital age. Data-driven approaches are particularly effective for meeting those expectations and rethinking the way governments and citizens interact. This report highlights the important role data can play in creating conditions that improve public services, increase the effectiveness of public spending and inform ethical and privacy considerations. It presents a data-driven public sector framework that can help countries or organisations assess the elements needed for using data to make better-informed decisions across public sectors.
OECD publications are always a team effort but this, the second piece to have my name on it, is hugely down to the work of my colleague Charlotte. Unfortunately she’s been away from the team since I joined so my contribution here was to pick up the thread of her research and get the paper to completion.
This Working Paper argues that governments need to go further in putting the collection, processing, sharing and reuse of their data (the Government Data Value Cycle) at the heart of how they think about digital transformation. It’s a guide to how governments can invest in public servants in order to recognise and use data as a core component of the modern state.
Plenty of governments have pockets of good practice but the challenge is to scale those into whole-of-government approaches that are well supported internally as well as finding favour with the public. This is the vision of the ‘data driven public sector’ (DDPS).
When I left the OECD last summer, it was for several reasons (some of them implicit in this blog post). And I’m pleased that I decided to do so. This… Read more: Back to work
This is the monthly round up of the things I’ve written. A quieter month of writing than July because it’s been the school summer holidays and it’s a wonderful dividend… Read more: What I wrote in August
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