Tag: Frameworks

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.

If you’re interested in consuming this report in a different format then I’ve posted the series of seminars I hosted with the Azerbaijani government in May 2024 which unpacks the Framework as a set of presentations.

Available as HTML or a PDF

What’s the TL;DR?

This report builds on our earlier working paper by doing two things:

• 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.

Available as HTML or a PDF