Exploring government data best practice

WATCH: Conference chair David Wilde picks out his personal highlights from the Government Data Show agenda...

The possibilities around government data are emerging and expanding at an ever-increasing rate. For public sector DDaT leaders, it’s essential to stay on top of those opportunities, know where to find transformational (but practical) case studies, and benchmark best practice with their peers.

That’s where the real strength lies in the agenda for the Government Data Show, coming up on 14-23 September 2021. The depth and breadth of speakers we've put together will bring out some really strong and challenging conversations around the depth and breadth of public sector data.

It's great to have David Henderson, Chief Geospatial Officer at Ordnance Survey on our panel exploring Government Data Quality Standards. GIS offers significant opportunities to link places and the data we collect, in order to drive location-specific interventions. I still think we don't do anything like enough around rendering data and using maps to provide visual representations, so it'll be great to hear what's going on in the geospatial data world. 

In sessions featuring Niamh McKenna (Chief Information Officer at NHS Resolution) and Indra Joshi ( Director of AI at NHSX) we’ll be exploring the relationship between data and healthcare - particularly relevant given what we've just been through over the last year and a half. Now that we don’t have the same emergency legislation in place to respond to the early stages of the pandemic, what does this mean for data sharing in the health arena? 

In the UK we, like many other countries around the world, have massive issues around ageing populations. and a lot of potential resolutions to those issues depend on cross-agency data sharing on an informed consent basis. 

Those challenges lead naturally to conversations with organisations like DWP (Paul Lodge, Chief Data Officer) and HMRC (Keith Nicholson, Head of Cyber Threat & Vulnerability) and those other major government departments - are they part of the problem or part of the solution, and how we can turn problems into solutions in those kind of environments?

It’s important to continue conversations with international peers, because I believe we can never stop learning from other governments and other countries in the world. We've got our friends Estonia back again (Ott Velsberg, Government Chief Data Officer, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Republic of Estonia). Estonia is ranked number 1 in the UN’s e-government survey so it’s always interesting to see what's going on in their digital transformation programmes. 

Equally, I'm intrigued by what's going on elsewhere around Europe, and of course, Canada, a country that’s well ahead in many of their uses of digital and data, but also brings a great deal of pragmatism to their approach (Mélanie Roberts, Executive Director, Information Management and Open Government, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, and Ima Okonny, Chief Data Officer, Employment and Social Development).

Some of the most innovative approaches to digital are happening at the local government level, and I’m pleased to see we have Chief Data and Chief Digital Officers from local authorities like Dionne Lowndes, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at the London Borough of Southwark. I'm particularly fascinated to hear what's happening in Leeds and how that's progressing, because they're a real success story around health and social care integration, and exploiting the huge potential around operating at a total-city level (Leonardo Tantari, Chief Digital Information Officer, Leeds City Council).  

All of the recent advances in the use of government data must, of course, be underpinned by security, resilience and effective governance and we’ll have Joe Dolan, Head of Northern Ireland Cyber Security Centre, sharing his insights. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that what the bad guys are after is the data, they don't care about the systems. 

These are set to be broad, deep conversations around government data, across the full spectrum of central government, local government healthcare organisations. It will be hugely enjoyable chairing many of those sessions and pulling out some of that shared knowledge. I look forward to seeing you there!