Draft Data Strategy

Across the ICS we currently use more than 1,000 different computer systems and applications. This creates a big challenge: the same information often gets stored in many different places and in different ways.

While these individual systems work well for their specific purposes, they often have overlapping features and duplicate functions. By identifying these overlaps, we can create a better solution: an open and flexible platform that works across all our systems. We can apply the same approach to organizing our data more efficiently.

During the Improving Lives (population health) platform discovery phase, we will start to identify the most valuable data within each system, which can be extracted into a virtual data platform for cross system access. Whilst integrations may have to initially use traditional Extract Transform Load (ETL) tools, we will seek to bypass any bespoke middleware in time by encouraging the adoption of industry standardised APIs (e.g. REST) for all our core systems of record. This will facilitate seamless, on-demand flows of data from front-line systems to our data platform.

Our ongoing audit will also identify the most opportune places in which to ‘strangle down’ less complex or specialist systems, having extracted the data to the data platform and determined the necessity (if any) to re-engineer the legacy processes of the redundant system.

Our data platform will be the foundation for various online services that will help the ICS work better together. For example, it will provide a reliable address search feature that we can use across all our websites, digital services, and office systems. We're currently working with the Surrey GIS Forum to create location-based services like these. It’s worth noting here that traditional databases can no longer handle all our different types of data effectively. Our systems need to work with many different kinds of information, including regular database information (like customer records and transactions), media files (such as audio, video, and pictures), social media content, information from various sensors, and online publications and their connections. By building a flexible data platform that can handle all these different types of information, we'll be better prepared to keep up with changing technology and adapt to new kinds of data.

A central data platform will help Somerset ICS combine different types of data in one place. This will make it easier to spot connections, patterns, and trends in our information. The system will work like a bridge between all our existing records, automatically collecting, cleaning, and organising data whenever we need it. This data can then be analysed at both local and system-wide levels. For the first time, we'll have easy, instant access to reliable information from across the county and beyond.

Making data open and available to the public is valuable for more than just being transparent and accountable. When we share our data, we allow our citizens, businesses, and researchers to work with us to solve community problems. For example, in Seoul, South Korea, the government shares its mapping data so that more people can help solve city planning challenges.

A great example of this approach happened in 2014, when two organizations - NESTA and the Open Data Institute (ODI) - created competitions using open data. These competitions led to useful tools that helped young people make better choices about their education, people in social housing find others to swap homes with and allowed buyers check if a bicycle was stolen before purchasing it.

When we share our data openly, others can create useful tools and services for the public without us having to spend a lot of money or manage everything ourselves. For example, apps like CityMapper (which uses Transport for London's open data), OpenStreetMap (which combines public data with community contributions), and CycleStreets show how valuable services can be created using open data. This approach works well - Transport for London saves about £4 million each year because they don't need to create their own apps.

Building upon the good work done by the Somerset Intelligence Partnership with their website we should now commit to opening up data for the Digital and Data SME community. Some of these datasets will represent ‘quick-wins’ and can therefore be published with relative ease, others will require a detailed understanding and data processing in order to publish in a usable form. We will engage with end-users of our publications as to how to prioritise our work and the best ways in which to foster the creation of mutually beneficial outputs.

Our membership of the ODI will allow us to network with the most innovative and talented in the industry and ensure we reach our intended audiences.

We plan to work with many different groups to help us achieve our goals for using data better. We'll partner with local, regional, and national organisations, including:

We believe it's important to include different perspectives and expertise in our data community. That's why we want to welcome anyone who's interested in helping, creating a team that brings together people with different skills and backgrounds.

We expect our community to grow organically as we share more of our data openly. This will create opportunities for tech start-ups, coding groups, researchers, and developers to get involved and create useful solutions.

Right now, different teams spend a lot of time working with data separately. While a central team will help handle some of this work more efficiently, it's still important that everyone across our ICS understands and feels comfortable working with data.

To help with this, we'll provide easy-to-use tools that let staff view and analyse information about their services in new and helpful ways. We'll also need to develop specialised data skills across our system. By becoming more data confident, staff will be able to understand specific work areas in more detail and understand the importance of certain statistics and data interpretations.

We should be addressing our skills gaps in several ways:

We need a central team that can access and work with all our data across the organisation. This team will help us get the most value from our information by bringing it together, cleaning it up, and analysing it properly.

The team will be made up of data scientists and data engineers - highly skilled professionals who are specially trained to turn raw data into useful insights.

This central team won't work alone - they'll collaborate with other data teams and staff across the ICS. Everyone will follow the same standards and frameworks to help achieve our broader goals for using data better.

Having this central team will help create positive changes in how we work. It will help build trust in sharing data between organisations and give people more confidence in using data to make decisions.