Public Sector Readiness

The research has identified that whilst public agencies are aware of the benefits which can be achieved from information sharing there is a lack of readiness. The scope of any information sharing project is increased due to previous IT infrastructure and planning. At a single organisation level the agency is still looking to overcome and rectify information silos which have built up over the preceding decades. In general there has been a lack of strategic IT planning at an organisational level resulting in disparate and often incompatible technologies across the organisation. Taking one organisation involved in the Sentinel project as an example. ASB data is reported to three departments; community safety, housing and environmental health. Each department has over the years adopted their own IT system to record and track incidents. Each system individually achieves the goals required by that department. To gather ASB statistics from this council three disparate systems must be interrogated. The community safety system and housing systems are able to generate spreadsheets which can be exported and manually manipulated to create a consolidated data source. The environmental health system cannot export data in any form, a search must be carried out with manual review of the onscreen data. The environmental health data cannot be aggregated with the other two systems output. The community safety system and housing system requires significant manual intervention to be able to successfully consolidate the data for interrogation. In simple terms the three existing disparate systems (in one council) create information silos which are not easily aggregated. Partners involved with the Sentinel project have attempted to improve on the silos of information in one of three ways. First as with the city council a data warehouse is created where every system uploads data at

regular intervals. The warehouse can then be interrogated to provide an aggregated view of the data (accurate to the latest uploads). The second approach implements a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system where calls are routed through a central system with workflows coming from the CRM into the silo systems with updates provided back to the CRM. The final approach to aggregating the silos is taken by Leicestershire police who utilise a search engine which is integrated with most systems within the force. When searching for information the search engine is used to bring back results from all integrated systems.

The problems with gathering data from multiple silos in to one source for interrogation are multiplied across the numerous partners involved in the information sharing project. Olivas (2005) reviewed non-technical barriers to information sharing and recommended activities which could improve information sharing. One suggestion was to create standards “for a minimum level of upward and downward compatibility” (2005, iii). This was in reference to word processing packages to enable people to share documents with a basic level of compatibility. If this idea was adopted by the UK government to create minimum standards which all public sector IT systems had to comply with some barriers to information sharing would be removed or at the very least reduced. There are numerous ways this could be achieved:

1. Creation of a single system for use by all public sectors.

2. Minimum standards for systems implemented by the public sector. 3. Creation of a central data warehouse

Creation of a single system for use by all public sector agencies would require significant investment and development. Historically large scale public IT implementations have been unsuccessful e.g. NHS database (BBC News, 2014). To ensure the system maximised potential for information sharing across all public sector agencies the system would need to be complex; potentially broken into modules for the various agencies e.g. police modules could include crime recording and custody management, council modules could include housing and environmental health. The modules would need to remain standardised to ensure the information could easily be aggregated. Alternatively the system could take a more functional approach, rather than dividing the system based on agency the modules could be split in a functional way e.g. ASB, crime, mental health, vulnerability. This way each agency could utilise the same modules based on the task they are carrying out. Utilising a single system would have risks associated with it. Firstly a single system storing all data required by the public sector would represent an attractive target for hackers. Security concerns would be high. In addition if every service is using the same system what system outages would have a large impact on the UK public sector.

Potentially the system could make large savings to the public sector. Once implemented licensing and maintenance fees from the large number of systems currently in use would be diminished and compatibility issues would be removed. A single system opens up potential efficiency savings by giving agencies access to data they would not normally have. For example for a witness statement to be made available to court the police must first take the statement from the witness. The statement must then be uploaded to the police system and then transferred to the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) system. These systems are often incompatible and require the statement to be printed out and rescanned by the CPS or alternatively re-input into the system. It must then be disclosed to lawyers and made available to the court. Again often incorporating manual interventions to make the statement available in a form accepted by the multiple systems. There is significant chasing required by various people along the process taking up valuable time. If the statement was input on to the single system when recorded by the police this would then be accessible to the relevant agencies making large time and resource savings. The option of utilising a single system is an ideal situation logically but is extremely unlikely to ever happen. It adopts a one size fits all approach which agencies are unlikely to agree to. The problems experienced in the Sentinel implementation attempting to gather agreement on what is required for the partnership to manage ASB on a single system would be multiplied exponentially.

An alternative approach would be to create a set of standards which all systems implemented in the public sector must adhere to. This approach is likely to be much more palatable to organisations who would still retain the freedom to choose their own system, which they feel best fit their needs. The minimum standards would require extensive consultation and research to ensure they are not only achievable but allow agencies to share information with minimal cost. At the most basic level the system would require the ability to export data in a standardised format, which could be viewed by partner agencies. A suggested requirement would be for all systems to be able to receive a basic record from another agencies system. The ability to receive records from a partner agency allows work to be more appropriately allocated for example if the police receive a call about nuisance noise at an address, they will attend and carry out the required work. If in the course of the investigation they find issues with a vulnerable child this work might more appropriately be dealt with by social services. The ability to transfer the record to another agency allows the second agency to take control of the incident without having to duplicate the initial stages of the investigation.

A third option would be for all public sector agencies to export their data to a central data warehouse. This would incorporate the need for some form of standardisation in the creation of an export format. The central data could then be accessed by multiple agencies for review. This is effectively what the police have opted for in the creation of the PND (NPIA, 2011a). A central system however acts more as a repository of

information. It enables improved decision making by having greater access to information it does not maximise opportunities for joined up working.