The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has published a “data strategy” document that sets out what it believes it will take to become an organisation transformed by data usage by 2030. This includes an organisational change towards a hub-and-spoke model for data management and governance, which is a common approach in the private sector.

The document explicitly cites 2023 as the starting point for the strategy. It is described as running from 2023 to 2030, and bears the title “DWP data strategy 2023 to 2030”.

In 2022, Simon McKinnon, chief digital information officer (CDIO) of DWP Digital, the department’s technology arm, set out a three-year plan to reimagine digital services. That seems to have included a DWP data-sharing pilot scheme in 2022.

Talking about that project at the time, Paul Lodge, then chief data officer (CDO) at DWP, said: “Currently, data-sharing arrangements between departments are lengthy to put in place or amend, and resource-intensive. As a result, the subsequent insight is often well behind the pace of change.”

According to Lodge, this made it difficult for government analysts and service delivery teams to understand what data is held by others or to confidently navigate their governance processes. “As a result, the department data silos across government make it hard to deliver joined-up interventions at the speed needed for our ambitious policy agenda,” he said.

Under the names of the department’s current CDO, Paul Francis, and its digital and transformation director, Helen Wylie, the data strategy policy paper harps on similar themes of siloed data at DWP.

It describes the data strategy as: “A fresh, departmental-wide approach to managing data, aligned with DWP’s 2030 vision and supporting the goal to reduce costs by 20% over the next five years.” 

It nods to the fashionable topic of artificial intelligence (AI). The execution of the data strategy will, the policy document says, “move us away from legacy systems to modern platforms that are more advanced and cost-effective”.

It adds: “This is all part of a wider digital transformation across government, some of it powered by innovative artificial intelligence technologies. But artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it learns from. It’s all about the quality of data, managed, governed, secured and shared with the right teams in the right way.”

The DWP, it notes, has over 85,000 staff, including 750 data analysts and 9,000 dashboard users exploiting and interacting with 1PB (petabyte) of data and 30 million digital events per day. The document says this petabyte is equivalent to 20 million tall filing cabinets. 

The data strategy is one element in a broader digital strategy, whose publication is said to be forthcoming.

The document sets out seven strategic priorities in building what the DWP calls a “data value chain”. These include making data access and sharing with other government departments and third parties seamless and governed. And embedding what it calls “a data culture … throughout DWP”. 

This will entail a new operating model for the department, a “federated hub-and-spoke model”.

The document says DWP will replace its “current hybrid, informal model” and learn from other “spokes” across Whitehall, in “Universal Credit (UC), Counter Fraud Compliance and Debt’s (CFCD) Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service (IRIS) and across the analytical community, as well as from industry where this model is widely adopted”.

The DWP hub will consist of a chief data office, data architecture, a data protection office, security, digital, a digital design authority, tech services, insight and performance excellence, data and analytics, and a data practice. 

The “spokes” at the DWP will be in disability, standard of living, later life, fraud and error, people and capability, finance group and the labour market.

The department says, in the policy document, that it believes its data principles have been established, and confirms it has created its chief data office. It has also started to modernise some of its data capabilities. “We have designed and started the delivery of seminal transformation initiatives such as the strategic reference architecture, service modernisation, data modernisation, or insight and performance excellence, and we are now ready to accelerate.”

In terms of the strategic priority of building a data culture, the document says the department will “effect a step-change in the ability of our colleagues to understand how to interpret business data”, in part through data masterclasses delivered by the chief data office.

The department also plans to address a shortage of civil servants with digital, data and technology skills, to use Whitehall jargon, by developing apprenticeship programmes and creating a data academy to upskill staff with an aptitude for working with data.

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