 Jenny was talking about open data, link data. Our next speaker is going to continue on that theme. Ian Sinclair is head of public sector consulting at IPL, which is a bath based for profit company. Ian heads IPL's public sector consulting practice and has been helping clients with their information and data management challenges for almost 10 years. He'll be speaking about what digital by default means for your organisation and what skills your people need to have in order to manage and exploit data in the information age, combating the data headaches of the digital age. Ian. Thank you. So I'll kick off by just saying a bit more about IPL because I bet most of you in the boom have not heard of us. I'm quite clear, we're not one of these big system integrators that Avery was talking about earlier. We're very much in the SME space. South West of England, we were set up in about 1979, we came out of aerospace and defence doing mission critical software basically. Today, most of you in this room, your mobile phones are running off our software. When you go online and do your banking, you're probably using our software. When you drive around the country on the motorways, you're going past our technology. We were all sorts of people in both sectors. I'm from the consulting side of the house and we're very much around making information an asset for our clients. We do that in three ways as you can see here. We do IM, EA and BPM and all these come together to make the management of information as an asset. We have a very clear message that it is not all about technology, it's not about just going out there and buying some witty bit of software. It is really all about people and process. So I call my talk to you today about the combating the data headaches of the digital age. What do I mean by data headache? I put some statistics up there and you can go to the internet and you can find lots of things about this. I think we all realise that data is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I can't even comprehend what a zetabyte is. Just doing that gives me a headache. I mean 10 to the power of 21. You just can't comprehend the amount of data that we are creating every year now. And it's just going to go and get worse. The key thing I wanted to point out here is that we've gone from a time when we were just managing structured data. We could handle that, it was in databases, it was a bit like Moore's Law. We knew it was getting bigger and we could manage it. Now, out of nowhere really, on structured data has hit us. We've started off with PCs, we've gone into laptops, tablets, mobile phones, social media. It's just getting worse. That's much, much harder for us to manage than the old structured data that we were using. We're actually making it worse for ourselves. I've used the word policy, but this whole digital by default agenda can only mean one thing for us as information professionals. That is, we've got more to manage. We've got to get a far smarter at managing all this data that's coming in. To get the value out of it, and that's the key thing, means we have to have the ability to analyse it and be far clever about how we analyse data now. I think actually we need to recognise that putting all the services online is really great. It's great for the citizen, it cuts costs to the government, but actually there's a bit of a hidden cost here because actually all this data actually costs you more to manage. I don't just mean it means we have to buy more service, I mean it means we need actually more people with specialist skills to be able to look after it. The message for me is we need to do something about this now. It's not going to go away, it's only going to get worse, and we need to get organised and be able to handle it. When we talk about managing it as an asset, what it needs to do is think about how you manage finances within your organisations, how you manage your people, how you manage your property. You have governance structures in there, you have accountability and responsibilities, and it's no different from managing information. Like I said at the beginning, we're not just talking technology here, it's about people's with the right skills, and that's what Edgyserv asked me to talk about to you today. What I'm going to do is talk about genetically with all civil servants, all people in your organisations, the kind of skills we want them to have now and going forward, and then I'll talk a bit more about the more specialist side of things about managing data and doing the analysis. Do you know what? We're not skilled in information management anymore, but we really were, and it wasn't that long time ago. Before we had computers, we had registries, didn't we? Paper used to come in and it was recorded, it was filed, it went on circulation, but the important thing is it was controlled. Then we rolled computers out to everybody and thought we could save money here because we'll let the individual do all that, but what we didn't do was give the individual any training in doing it or any processes to do it, and now really it's quite chaotic. I'm sure all your organisations are in the same boat where you've really lost control of your information assets. So there are skills out there, and there are things that we can do. They may not be new, but probably they are new to organisations within the public sector because industry has been doing this for a long time, even before this data explosion that we're experiencing now. They've had to do it purely because they've been legally obliged to. You've probably seen in the news, I'm sure, especially in the States where top executives end up going to jail because they get it wrong where data is concerned. I don't think that's going to happen to any civil servants, but the ICO are now handing out very big fines to government bodies to getting it wrong where data is concerned. So the emphasis is there to make information management everyone's responsibility within your organisations. The key thing is it's not going to happen overnight. It requires a cultural change within your organisations. One of those things is getting away from the mindset that data information is something that the IT department do, which is quite a common thing, and that's back to that history where we've been managing data for a long time in databases, and therefore it's just what IT do. So it does require a cultural shift, and to do that you're going to have to start educating your people. We've talked about training already this morning. There is a training bit in there. I know some organisations in the public sector make people do annual information management training, an online course. It's that kind of thing to reinforce people's behaviours. It's not something we're just going to do as a one-off. So there are some important things that your people should be doing to look after your information. I'll put a few examples here. Housekeeping is a really big thing. So how many people, let's have a test here, how many show of hands, how many people regularly go through, say, their outlook or their files and deleting everything they've got? Yeah, it's not many, is it? And the reason is, because it's quite a common perception, that storage is cheap, so if you run out of space, well, IT are just going to go and buy some more servers, aren't they? And they probably will, but all we're doing is making the problem worse because we have this tendency to keep things. What we need to do is get people back into the good habits of doing housekeeping. The old days, if your filing cabinet was full, you'd have to go and do something about it and you would go and clear it out and get rid of the stuff you don't need. Another key thing is the ability to tag information so we can find it again in the future. So that's where the whole metadata piece comes in. So when we're creating our Word documents or Excel files, it's really important that we fill in the properties or if we're using SharePoint or whatever our document management system is, when we're using taxonomy so that in the future, when we need to answer that freedom of information request in five years' time, we can actually find all the information that's relevant to the question. And the final one I've got up there is this general thing about quality and everybody understanding that information is an asset to your government department but to the government as a whole and they have to value it and therefore they need to A, care about its use but ensure that it's fit for purpose. So this isn't about when you're talking to a citizen and you're gathering their information and you're just leaping over mandated fields and something because it makes it quicker for you to get it. That information needs to be captured for a reason and it's getting people to understand that's what they're going to have to do. So that's the sort of wider generic stuff. But you still need specialists within your organisation to help to manage your information. So I said earlier that, you know, think finance, think property, think HR, you have a government structure in place. You need somebody who's responsible for managing or responsible for your information and data as an asset within your organisation. So there's so many challenges out there now that have to be dealt with. So here I'm talking about, you know, just providing services to the citizen and how many touch points there are now. So for me I could be talking to the government about or government department about, you know, renewing my tax disk or maybe I want to renew my passport or I'm going to talk to the council about my council tax or my bin hasn't been collected. There's just so many interactions that the citizen has with government departments and in all sorts of different ways because we can, you know, we can, I could phone them up, I could walk into something, I'm on the internet, maybe I'm going to send them a text, a tweet. This is all different kinds of information that's coming into us and that's causing us the headache. So here I've talked about the increase in volume, variety and velocity and this is the only time I'm going to use the big data phrase because it's just hype, but this is what you'll see when you hear people talk about that because there are so many more devices and ways for people to communicate that naturally that just increases the amount of information that we're going to have to deal with. And because of all these devices that means there's lots of different formats of information that we've never had to deal with before and the speed as well because most people, most people these days are probably online and it's far quicker to send a text or type an email on your mobile device and go home and write a letter. So it really is a headache. And like I say, formal governance is the key to managing it and to give you an idea of how important it is, you know, I'm working with a major council in the south-west at the moment on data governance as part of their information strategy. And on the other hand, my opposite number in the industry side of our business, he does consultancy, he's out in Saudi Arabia at the moment helping one of their major banks put in a data governance programme. Now this is stuff that's of interest to everybody. Everybody's got to do it all over the globe, whatever their sector is. And one of the key things that I think for the public sector is is to learn from what they've done in industry is all about customer relationship management. I think you'll probably recognise more citizen relationship management. But this may be a new concept within the public sector because industry's been doing it for years. Because industry wants to make money and industry needs to know the buying habits of the people they're selling to. Well, we want to know how we interact with the citizen and improve the services that we provide to them. So to do this whole management piece is going to require some skills, okay? And this is where you are going to need people who have additional hats so you expand their roles or you may need more professional information management type people to do it. So for example, we need to assure the quality of the information that we're looking after. So a whole data quality piece would normally be you need people who understand the business information, they understand the value of it to the business, they understand when it's wrong and they understand how to fix it. So that's the whole data quality piece that's normally a specialist area. And that's what I did when I was in the civil service. And I'm talking 10 years ago. So this is something really new. And there's things like master data management. So this is about making sure that information is coherent across your organisation. So when we talk about driving value out of that information and you get your intelligence layer, you need to make sure that you're comparing apples with apples. Because if you're not, you're going to be making decisions based on the wrong type, the wrong information. And we need to look at actually what we're doing about holding all this information. Now I've got records management on here. Well that records management isn't anything new. We've been doing that for years. But records management in the digital age is something quite different because of the volume of information that we have and are keeping. And because of this concept that storage is cheap, it's quite a lot easier to say well I'm just going to make this record because I can't be bothered to make the decision about whether I need to get rid of it or not. And so then how do we make sure we are keeping the right things and we're gaping the things that have value going forward? Archiving is something that we need to consider. We don't want to fill our live systems with information that people don't need to access regularly. We need to understand our assets how often they need to be accessed whether we can stick them on tape somewhere, whether we put them in the cloud, hand it over to a third party. But it's all about maintaining the value of that information and driving down costs. And the really difficult thing is the whole digital continuity issue about how do we actually maintain access to that information in the future. So, you know, we're all familiar with the 30 year rule and government documents get published. Well how is that information that's being stored today going to be readable and usable in 30 years time? Are we still going to be able to access Microsoft Word files in you know, 2013? I don't know. There's an answer at the moment. But there are things that you can do to at least prepare yourselves as best you can at the moment. The key factor here is around enterprise search. And this is very important. It ties back to having the right metadata. Because you need to be able to find things in the future. Because there's far more information that we are storing, it's harder to actually find the things of value. So you need people who have some sort of expertise about enterprise search and can ensure again, when you know that freedom of information request comes in that you can answer it within the 20 working days because you can find all that information that's relevant to the question that you're trying to answer. So we're now managing our data as an asset. But now we want to drive the true value out of it. So we need to be able to analyse it. And now we're looking far broader than what we would call traditional management information. So we get a monthly report, quarterly report and annual report as we've always done in the past. Probably nobody actually looks at it and ends up as shelfware. Well now we have the technology and skills to start doing clever things with information, looking at trends, looking maybe into the future and doing predictions, managing the performance of our department and how we're spending the taxpayers' money. And what we can do is actually tell the story with data. So instead of me having to dig out five years' worth of reports and go through them to try and understand what's happened we can have some sort of user interface where you can build in data and you can look at this year's data and you can add in last years and two, three years ago and start to see pictures emerging. The key part of the skills that are needed is how that information is visualised to your end user. So there are things about interactive dashboards. So depending on what the user wants to do they could just look at if they've got something on their screen it's a bit more than just pie charts and bar charts than they can drill into however many levels they need to. Or we can do clever things like heat maps and bore maps and busy things that we can do with information now to make it easier for those people who need to consume it understand its meaning and its value. We can layer data and a common example of that is using GIS mapping data and I was actually at Bristol yesterday and they were showing me what they'd done with all the maps of Bristol City that they'd got going back over two, three hundred years and you can layer it so you can actually go to any part of the city and then drill down through what it looked like through history. Even say if you wanted to go back to World War II and see what was bombed, they've got all the bomb sites and then you can drill in, you can click on something and the photo comes up to show you what the buildings were like when they got bombed. That's just one example of how we can exploit the public data for the interest of the citizen and then the important thing is now it's not just internally within your organisations it's as you were saying it's about open data and it's making that information usable for everybody. Skills required it is more now about analytics, you need analytical people, probably with a mathematical bent these days to do this and people I've caught information designers and I guess what I mean by that is people who are designing these user interfaces need to have more graphic design bent because it is about how you present information to the to your people and to the citizen so they can best exploit it. So just to finish then, the three key messages are this isn't going to go away it's only going to get worse so we've got to do something about it and is about how you manage your information as an asset and put in the right mechanisms in place and there's an awful lot that can be learned from what's been done in the private sector in industry because they've been doing this for a long time. Look after your data, it will look after you.