 Thank you very much, Andy, and thank you to Edgeserv for inviting me along today. I've learnt a great deal, primarily because I am not a technologist, I'm not a data scientist, and I know absolutely nothing about ICT. So apologies in advance for all of that massive gap in my knowledge and understanding. What I do hope that I know a little bit about is reform to public services. And what I'm going to talk about briefly, and as Andy said, it's in relation to a report that demos along with SAS UK, which is a division of a big multinational data analytics company, and with Research Republic, which is a partner organisation about how it's produced this year, is around what we think the potential benefits and also the potential challenges for making use of big data in public services will be. And before I go into my presentation, which by the way is the least cool of all of the slide shows you've had today, I've been very impressed with the various diagrams and the animations. Mine is just bullet points, I'm very sorry for that. Before I go into that, a couple of observations on things that we've kind of heard today, which I think are interesting and which it's important to think about before we launch into it. At the very start of the day, Andy said that there was a lot of confusion, confusion that he thought was potentially unhelpful between the open data agenda and the big data agenda. And I think that's true, and I think certainly that central government has been in some way responsible for this because we never really hear from central government about big data. What we hear about is open data and sometimes wrapped into that are actually proposals and ideas around big data. But I also think that confusion within the public sector is to some extent necessary. As I'll go on to talk about a little bit when I'm trying to run through some of the risks and the challenges around the big data agenda and public services, there's simply, and we have to be honest about this, there simply is not necessarily the expertise within the public sector outside of course of universities where we're all fabulous and know everything about everything. There simply isn't the expertise to necessarily make use in the best possible way of the vast resources of data that are held. And adding to that a kind of moral ethical question about whether or not simply because we produce data in our relationships with government, government that necessarily owns that. And I think actually you have a really strong case for the close marriage between the open data and big data agendas that the government has put forward certainly in terms of the rhetoric around what the government wants to do with data. The only other observation I make is that the reason that we were interested in looking at this. Demos is a think tank. We do airy-fairy political stuff. We're not, you know, there are no graphs because there are no facts. It's all about what it is, it's all about what it is that we think might happen. So the reason we were interested in looking at this is because we've been concerned for some time about declining levels of trust that the public have in the services that are supposed to be serving them. And that's almost across the board. I mean, there are some exceptions. People still love their GPs. They hate the NHS. I mean, I think the NHS is incredibly inefficient, but they love their GPs. But across the board overall, public services have a declining level of trust and we run focus groups and other such staffed social science things in order to try and get at why it is that trust is declining so rapidly so drastically in public services and in the public sector. And the conclusion that we keep coming back to is that, whereas you might argue that in lots of different areas, the public sector once upon a time broadly resembled the commercial sector in terms of how it dealt with its clients or the people that it was there to serve, the commercial sector has moved on. So we expect now, Amazon, which was raised earlier, to know things about our purchases and not to bother us with things that are irrelevant to us. And we expect Google to understand what it is we're likely to be searching for. Public services have not adapted in the same way. They haven't driven themselves forward. And because it's not a sector where displacement happens naturally, we have not been able to kind of push that through. And I think that in that sense, even though big data in terms of how the public services use it is massively under impactful, actually big data has had a massive impact on public services because what it's done is helped to create an atmosphere where our expectations of what public services are able to offer us are no longer met. And that is inherently problematic. Now then, ironically perhaps, terrible at technology. So we're going to try this. Oh, that's the wrong one. That would be why. We knew that was going to happen. OK. I think it's important to take a step back. You guys all know an awful lot about kind of ICT systems and what you can do with massive data sets and those of you who are researchers are using these things on a daily basis. In the public sector, we still have to have a conversation about why big data is important, why proper engagement with understanding of an analysis of big data is vitally important. And we've heard a lot about organisational change and obviously within the private sector that happens in healthy and successful companies within those companies or in sectors where there aren't necessarily healthy and successful companies, it happens through displacement. In the public sector, organisational change, taking public servants with us in terms of understanding why the collection, collation and analysis of big data is so important is going to be an even bigger challenge than it is in your Tesco or your other commercial enterprise. And key to understanding why that is is something that's really rather nice about public servants, which is the sense of vocation. We ran several focus weeks with people working at every level in different public services from the real front line all the way up to almost permanent secretary level in Whitehall. And what you get from people when you start talking to them about how to analyse data, how to understand the messages that are being transmitted to them and the insight is a very real sense, especially from front line workers, that they almost see data analysis as being adversarial to their sense of their purpose because they think that they're in a vocation and they want to treat people like human beings. And you hear this a lot from doctors, actually. I'm sure anyone who's worked in the healthcare area will agree. And the important, the overriding message in terms of how to sell this agenda to front line workers and public servants is that the beauty of big data, I would argue, and the beauty of it used properly within the public service world is that it makes your relationships with people more human and more reciprocal. And it gives you better understanding of people. It's not about turning you into a robot. And I think it was Anthony's slide earlier which showed how you can jiggle the doctor-patient relationship, actually sum that up really beautifully. We've identified four key areas where we think learning from basic kind of commercial sector and from attempts in other countries to utilise big data better within public services where we think that real advances can be made and where we think the benefits can be readily sold to public servants. The first of those is around innovation. And any of you who work in a commercial environment will intuitively understand why this is an important thing to understand if you're trying to run a kind of people-driven business. Data can drive a huge public sector innovation. We've seen that in other countries. We've seen that in Canada and elsewhere. The important thing about this, and it brings me back to my slight quibble with the open data, big data separation, is to understand that this requires us to make public sector data once it's generated accessible to those who lie outside of public services. That's in part about skills. That's not to say that the knowledge contained within the public sector is not vital to understanding, but it's also partly about trying to build new systems of engagement. When we talk about that separation how the public servants engage with their clients as opposed to how the commercial sector engages with its clients, one of the key things it comes down to is this idea of relationships and understanding. And because in public services we're not on the whole talking about people who are on a daily basis being measured against the satisfaction of their clients because their clients on the whole can't walk away, we need outside innovation in order to help us to understand what would be useful. And this is something that I think the public sector has been very, very poor at. There are huge, huge, huge quantities of data out there and the stuff that's obviously and automatically useful, stuff around genomes and disease and the spread of illness, et cetera, that's being pursued brilliantly by all kinds of clever people, some of whom are in this room. But the stuff that's not obviously useful but would be obviously useful to test codes is not necessarily being used particularly well. And if we think about public sector and the places at which we access the public sector, one of the things that's been hugely problematic over the last decade has been the way in which certain public sector brands like Job Center Plus have been completely toxified. People absolutely loath them. They feel belittled by them. They feel like these places have no understanding of them at all. And in some ways and slightly counterintuitively, certainly to a lot of frontline workers, big data can help us to solve some of those problems around the toxicity of brands because it can help us to track individual journeys. It can help us to learn about what it is that makes people disengage at certain points from vital public services and right across the board from healthcare to welfare. This is increasingly important because one of the big reasons for inefficiency within the public sector has been the fact that we turn people off and they only come at the last minute. So one of the big inefficiencies has been people's reluctance to voluntarily engage with public services and that's something that big data can help us with by tracking those journeys in exactly the same way that you would track a customer's journey is from the moment they walk into the test codes until the moment they leave and they spent their money and that can help us to improve the service that we're offering. I mentioned outside impetus and getting people outside to assist. The other important thing that public services at a kind of central white hall level need to get much, much better at in our view is aligning the way in which they engage with their own staff with the data they already have. So DWP has this ideas generating system. It's very clever. They call it a game. It's not a game. What it is is like TripAdvisor. The staff type in ideas and then the other staff vote on them and the ones that get to the top, the permanent secretary sees and he goes, oh that's marvellous, let's do that. It's brilliant but it's completely lacking context because what DWP haven't done is communicated with their staff data that explains to them the problems that DWP as a corporate body experiences. So it's great to have innovative fresh new ideas from the woman working on the front desk at Job Center Plus in Darlington but unless that woman has a broader understanding that is quite easily communicable if you just take all the data analysis that's already done and disseminate that so that public servants understand why it's relevant to them you end up with a set of ideas which might be fantastic but are broadly irrelevant. So that's something that in terms of innovation and if we want to engage public servants in this process we need to get much better at. Allocation. Resource allocation is a huge component of this. We want to be able to allocate resources in our public services in a way that is efficient and in a way that responds to need but at the same time we're fragmenting the way in which we commission public services and so you will have health and wellbeing boards distributing the public health money that epidemiologists feed into in terms of understanding why that's important. You'll have PCCs, policing and crime commissioners deciding on how we're going to allocate resources within policing areas and that's whatever you think of the politics of that that's the direction of travel. So what is needed in terms of the public sector is something which the public sector is incredibly bad at and which if clever university people could come up with a solution for that would be commendable which is better segmentation of the data sets that exist. The last government experimented with this through total place and trying to build a kind of neighbourhood level understanding of the various interactions that people within those areas have had with public services the various needs they have etc. It is by no means close enough and when you think that a major retailer understands on a store by store basis and allocates product and changes their supply chain on a store by store basis in order to have the most efficient offering possible you can see the huge difference then that we see in the public sector where the starting point is that everything will be pretty much the same until it becomes incredibly obvious that something needs to change normally that's changed at a fairly big level so we need to get much much better understanding how to segment data how to understand it at a local basis and how to then connect that data analyse and provide insight from it to the people who are with the best will in the world not technocrats they're going to be enthusiastic amateurs who are elected clever people like you distilling data for them in a way that enables them to make decisions that are informed on the basis of the science understanding if you're a company you have an incentive to develop an understanding of what other needs your customers might have so you have an incentive that's fairly obvious to you because if you can understand a new need or a need that's not being met for your current offering that's really an important and very basic way in which capitalism works quite effectively public services don't necessarily have that incentive in fact in many ways they have a counter incentive because the discovery of new need means more work and because resources certainly over the last couple of years are only declining and so what big data allows us to do is to draw a link between the extra work that you are putting in because you've discovered a new need which you've discovered through big data and draw a link between that and savings further down the road there's been a lot of very excitable talk about new ways of funding public services new ways of funding charitable endeavour things like social impact bonds where you essentially commercialise the process on the basis of the money that will be saved by the intervention that you made all of those things are at a very developmental stage now and all of them require us to be able to analyse what's happened before and then predict on that basis and the slide that the previous speaker used around the landslide and being able to analyse that obviously that's a slightly more sure thing I would imagine but nonetheless there's a really important corollary here thinking about healthcare interventions if we're thinking about neighbourhood interventions around what you do to avert crime prevent crime etc and if we're thinking about educational interventions these things cost money so as a local authority or as a PCC or whatever it is you've got to make a brave decision that you're going to find some extra money you're going to take it from somewhere else and you're going to put it into this thing if we can use big data to demonstrate the trends coming out and demonstrate the money saved later on that decision suddenly becomes a lot easier and in the early days of the Blair Government when it was very popular to talk about return on investment and doing cost benefit analyses etc one senior minister eventually said to his civil servants I don't want to hear any more about cost benefit analysis or return on investment or future long term predicated savings because it's all bollocks and the awful thing is that he was kind of right except that he was kind of right in that you can't show it and if you can't show it it's not true but what big data and what using the existing data sets that we have and generating new ones and having an understanding of what new data we need to generate around trial interventions and pilots and how much longer we need to follow people for etc we can start to show it in a way that's a little bit more a little bit more safe shall we say than simply me saying then only 10 of these kids did this and that's a really crucial thing and so I think the big data is the missing link in lots of the kind of innovative funding models that are being talked about and then finally in terms of the good stuff there's the question of improvement which I've kind of separated out from everything else because I think this is the bit where you can have a really productive conversation with front line workers improvement is about day to day technical improvement across a range of things that you're doing in your day to day work and it resembles most closely and I can't remember which speaker it was it was the keynote this morning it was about utility companies and the way in which they use real time data in order to understand how they can better allocate energy or water or whatever it is that they're dealing with real time data is potentially incredibly important in public services particularly and certainly the place where most advances have been made in this particularly around policing and here we're not just talking about using your own data but we're also talking about using publicly available data and so we're talking about during the London riots finding a way of using the social networking information that's being produced and processed in order to have a much more clear understanding of where with your limited policing resource to make the most impact and I realise of course that this is an incredibly controversial thing I think people talk about snooping a lot and obviously it's up to everyone to have their view on it but I would recommend a paper that Demos produced a couple of weeks ago which was by the former head of GCHQ talking about and he has a vested interest I think we should be honest talking about this issue and what the kind of right level and he makes the point absolutely brilliantly that arguably what we're talking about doing here is taking the ad hoc process of human intelligence and this applies outside of just policing or spying whatever you want to call it but taking the ad hoc process of human intelligence from the woman on the front desk at Job Centre Plus in Darlington or from the chap who happens to be parked outside with a little dish listening to the conversation inside and we're making that a more scientific process by using data rather than using purely human insight and Public Service properly trained in basic analysis should be able to use live data and crucial to that is that we start producing more live data in our public services and one of the huge issues and when we go on to talk about challenges which I will very briefly in a second one of the huge issues is that actually the public sector produces quite a lot of crap data produces quite a lot of essentially meaningless data and sometimes misses huge amounts that it could be collating and collecting and then there's another problem which is the speed or the relative lack of speed at which the collection transmits to use so we're not there yet there are a number of challenges to embedding big data in public service professional lives I've outlined three because I think they're the three most important fear is powerful and fear exists and when we talk about fear we need to be clear that we're talking about both Public Service themselves and their levels of fear but we're also talking about the public and it's been alluded to throughout today but I think it bears repeating quite clearly that the public is incredibly and deeply suspicious of attempts to collect their data and I realised just how powerful this feeling is when I went to register for a new doctor I was working on this project at the time and I know how important it is that the NHS is able to use my records for medical research but still my pen lingered over the little box that I had to tick as I sat and thought wow is there anything embarrassing in my medical records but we'll leave that for drinks but the fear that the public has has to be overcome and it can only be overcome by talking about those benefits I think that we need to move in terms of the government's position on this and the rhetoric that's used around this we need to move to a position which we're not yet in where the government talks and where government ministers talk openly about this being something of a civic duty so we have a responsibility to one another as members of a community that responsibility means giving other people the ability to utilise the data that we generate as we reap the benefits of our mammoth welfare state skills oh no sorry the fear in public servants is two-fold one is what I alluded to earlier which is that this idea that big data somehow or any kind of data public servants talk about paperwork because if they're the only people on earth you've ever had to fill out a form but there is a justifiable question mark in their heads about the extent to which a more rigorous and vigorous use of big data across public services will in effect me more paperwork for them and more form-filling or collation and collection for them that can be overcome I think through tech and through skills but nonetheless that exists and the secondary fear is that because of some of the stuff which I was earlier being a friend of because of some of the stuff about openness being confused with proper data use and better use of big data there is a real fear amongst lots of public servants that what this agenda is actually about is catching people out and I think that we have to be sending some positive messages about this helping people to fulfil their vocations rather than being about helping to bash public servants over the head I gave evidence to Hackney Council's scrutiny committee it's so exciting glamorous when they were talking about the issue of what to make transparent, what to put online etc it was extraordinary they were sat there and one of them was talking about what if the press did it and then they don't understand it I suppose it's a little bit similar to the question about research data and what if somebody takes my data and then misuses it I think we're all going to have to grow up about that a little bit I don't think we any longer live in a world where much that happens in government can be secret forever anyway far better to publish it up front but we do need to be reinforcing for public servants themselves for the people who are worried about being caught out in a hijacked and attacked we do need to keep reiterating to them that there are huge positives for them in the day to day doing of their job Skills throughout today I've been struck by the fact that people have talked about the lack of adequate skills in terms of data scientists or whatever you want to call them kind of Californian surfing business analysts whatever they are the lack of skill in the British marketplace across the board which in a way is slightly reassuring but an overwhelming factor in the public sector we didn't really look that much at the extent to which there's a skill gap that's the same in the private sector and because that's across the board that's an area where I think government and indeed universities have an enormous role to play in terms of trying to fill in some of this gap we are miles behind lots of other countries presumably we're miles behind America because apparently that's where they all live finally tech and this is where I'm slightly embarrassed because we all tell and we're all friends now so we can all tell I know nothing about tech I do know what it is that people who are responsible for trying to drive change in the use of data across public services say about tech they say that it's under invested in and they also say that there's a lack of understanding in terms of central government in terms of opponent secretaries in terms of the people who are in charge of driving lots of this forward an acute lack of understanding about what it's for and so therefore a lack of understanding is best which I think brings us back to the question the overall question around fear and around driving some positive messages about this my final final final comment and I will shut up I absolutely promise is that actually the university sector has a huge role to play in demonstrating what change looks like and in driving it forward and in helping to start to bridge some of those kind of culture gaps that exist university sector has long wide array of areas being an interesting bridge between the public sector in terms of ethos in terms of mission and the private sector in terms of relationships that exist in terms of investment etc that in terms of the big data conversation and the big data conversation with public servants is going to be ever more important and I think there's really interesting stuff being done by organisations like dartington that are kind of quasi-academic organisations which is precisely about this thing of how you take those massive massive government datasets you interrogate them you understand them, you analyse them you generate insight from them and that insight is something you can change in the day to day management and delivery of public services but dartington's tiny compared to what the government is and so the real key then is to find ways of vandalising and driving change in terms of the attitude to data in central government itself thank you so much for being patient Max thank you very much I really enjoyed that Any questions for Max? Go on I'll shout OK Very well I want to pick up this thing about trust and I think there's an area where that's relevant to the area I work in which is HE and indeed public libraries which are not a toxic brand which actually quite reverse they've got a lot of things going for them so they're interested in this big data but as we said the skills and all these things are lacking so where their big data tends to be residing is for example with publishers or aggregators you know the dirty Elseviers and the world and all that kind of stuff the dark laws so is there a way in which you could perhaps suggest you know it's not a technology solution as you see so here we've got trusted public services both in academic libraries and local authorities who don't have the skills who don't have the infrastructure who have very valuable data how are they going to combine that trust so that for example when somebody said to me don't buy Facebook shares because they're going to go bust because they will lose the trust so 2014 Facebook failure could be the library or the public sector opportunity to deliver big data perhaps in a trustful way but how might you see that kind of linking up and working so I don't know whether this will be an answer to your question so I apologise in advance I think that there's a really interesting point here which is so one of the things so when local authorities commission people to run their bin services or to run their care services even they never, I'm sure there are some heroic examples they never think about the data that the commercial company be at a circle of this world or a capital whatever the data that they're going to be producing which streamlines their own way of working and which therefore generates a profit for them and I think the single biggest and best thing that you could do for free in terms of the public sector and helping them to understand what data could mean for them is getting written into commissioning contracts and I will bring it back to getting written into commissioning contracts that the data will be shared that the data will be accessible that seeing as it's generated using public funds and delivering public services that it belongs in some sense at least to the public it was an extraordinary thing going back to well I won't mention the specific council although given the rest of the talk you can probably guess it's brilliant question that one of the councillers asked me which was we asked a company delivering a set of services for us to come and give evidence to the scrutiny commission and they refused because it wasn't in their contract right and there is a huge amount of this this kind of public agencies public bodies who you're right don't necessarily have the skills etc but allowing other people not simply to monetise the data that is created or the data that they own but then reaping no particular advantage from it at all subsequently and so I think there's a huge job of education to be done around what you can get back whether it's sharing your material so that it can be digitised and curated or whether it's commissioning someone to collect your bins and wondering how it is they managed to do it at half the price and turn a £50,000 a year profit there's a huge amount that can be done just purely through how we write those commissioning contracts and how we educate public servants in what they're supposed to be getting back for the contracts that they're handing out and I think that's a kind of public responsibility that public servants have but that they're not necessarily aware of and we have to bear in mind that when you're talking about again everything from the resources you're talking about in terms of research in terms of data that's being generated there to much much more mundane stuff in terms of bins to use my example again the idea that you can't ask for that data you can't ask for it because somehow that would be an impertinence that has to go out the window when commercial enterprises engage in contracts with each other to share things so that one side or the other can monetise it because they have the skills you can bet your bottom dollar that only the very stupidest CEO is signing a contract which gives them no long term gain from what has been created Can I move us on now? Can we just say thank you once again to Max?