Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
A film by Sandy Smolan [56 minutes]: “Big Data is defined as the real time collection, analyses, and visualization of vast amounts of information. In the hands of Data Scientists this raw information is fueling a revolution which many people believe may have as big an impact on humanity going forward as the Internet has over the past two decades. Its enable us to sense, measure, and understand aspects of our existence in ways never before possible.
The Human Face of Big Data captures an extraordinary revolution sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, healthcare, and everyday life. It’s already enabling us to provide a healthier life for our children. To provide our seniors with independence while keeping them safe. To help us conserve precious resources like water and energy. To alert us to tiny changes in our health, weeks or years before we develop a life—threatening illness. To peer into our own individual genetic makeup. To create new forms of life. And soon, as many predict, to re—engineer our own species. And we’ve barely scratched the surface…
This massive gathering and analyzing of data in real time is allowing us to address some of humanities biggest challenges. Yet, as Edward Snowden and the release of the NSA documents has shown, the accessibility of all this data can come at a steep price….(More)”
Many factors contribute to the rise of such efforts, including presidential support, statutory encouragement, and an ongoing evolution in the way government does its business. The challenge now is how to solidify the best of them so they remain in place beyond the upcoming 2017 presidential transition.
Increased Use of Collaborative Governance
Dr. Rosemary O’Leary, an astute observer of trends in government, describes how government has steadily increased its use of collaborative approaches in lieu of the traditional hierarchical, bureaucratic approach. According to O’Leary, there are several explanations for this shift:
Early in his administration, President Barack Obama publicly placed a premium on the use of collaboration. One of his first directives to federal agencies set the tone for how he envisioned his administration would govern, directing agencies to be “collaborative” and “use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across levels of government, and with nonprofits, businesses and individuals.” To that end, the Obama administration undertook a series of supporting actions, including establishing crossagency priority goals around issues such as reducing veteran homelessness, data sharing, and streamlining the sharing of social media licenses between agencies. Tackling many of these issues successfully involved the transformative intersection of innovation and technology.
In 2010, when Congress passed a series of amendments to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), it provided the statutory basis for a broader, more consistent use of collaboration as a way of implementing policies and programs. These changes put in place a series of administrative processes:
Taken together, these legislative changes embedded the value of collaboration into the administrative fabric of the governing bureaucracy. In addition, the evolution of technology tools and the advances in the use of social media has dramatically lowered the technical and bureaucratic barriers to working in a more collaborative environment….(More)”
National Archives of Australia: “The Digital Continuity 2020 Policy is a whole-of-government approach to digital information governance. It complements the Australian Government’s digital transformation agenda and underpins the digital economy. The policy aims to support efficiency, innovation, interoperability, information re-use and accountability by integrating robust digital information management into all government business processes.
The policy is based on three principles, and for each of them identifies what success looks like and the targets that agencies should reach by 2020. All Digital Continuity 2020 targets are expected to be achieved as part of normal business reviews and ongoing technology maintenance and investment cycles.
Agencies will manage their information as an asset, ensuring that it is created, stored and managed for as long as it is required, taking into account business requirements and other needs and risks.
Case study – Parliamentary Budget Office
Agencies will transition to entirely digital work processes, meaning business processes including authorisations and approvals are completed digitally, and that information is created and managed in digital format.
Case study – Federal Court of Australia
Agencies will have interoperable information, systems and processes to improve information quality and enable information to be found, managed, shared and re-used easily and efficiently.
Case study – Opening government data with the NationalMap
Carnegie Council: “Design thinking has emerged as a new tool in humanitarianism. Proponents of the trend believe it can solve the problem long plaguing the aid community: that great ideas fail to be adopted in poor communities because they don’t always take context into account. But are design’s more inclusive methods still a kind of neo-imperialism? Is there a different way?
In this episode of Carnegie Council’s podcast Impact: Where Business and Ethics Meet, host Julia Taylor-Kennedy interviews Debbie Aung Din Taylor,Bruce Nussbaum, Susan Eve Oguya, and Jocelyn Wyatt….
With the rise of social enterprise and corporate social responsibility in the business world, and more efficiency and impact measurements in the non-profit world, one of the trends we’re tracking on the podcast is how global business and global society borrow ideas and methods from one another. This week, we’re looking at an approach that was developed in the business world that’s proving hugely effective in humanitarian work. It’s called human-centered design. And some say it might work even better in the social sector than it did in large corporations. We’ll get back to that later….(More)”
Ferry Grijpink, Alan Lau, and Javier Vara at McKinsey: “The “hackathon” has become one of the latest vogue terms in business. Typically used in reference to innovation jams like those seen at Rails Rumble or TechCrunch Disrupt, it describes an event that pools eager entrepreneurs and software developers into a confined space for a day or two and challenges them to create a cool killer app. Yet hackathons aren’t just for the start-up tech crowd. Businesses are employing the same principles to break through organizational inertia and instill more innovation-driven cultures. That’s because they offer a baptism by fire: a short, intense plunge that assaults the senses and allows employees to experience creative disruption in a visceral way.
For large organizations in particular, hackathons can be adapted to greatly accelerate the process of digital transformation. They are less about designing new products and more about “hacking” away at old processes and ways of working. By giving management and others the ability to kick the tires of collaborative design practices, 24-hour hackathons can show that big organizations are capable of delivering breakthrough innovation at start-up speed. And that’s never been more critical: speed and agility are today central to driving business value,1 making hackathons a valuable tool for accelerating organizational change and fostering a quick-march, customercentric, can-do culture.
A 24-hour hackathon differs from more established brainstorming sessions in that it is all about results and jump-starting a way of working, not just idea generation. However, done well, it can help shave 25 to 50 percent from the time it takes to bring a service or product to market. The best 24-hour hackathons share several characteristics. They are:
Mark Samuels at ZDnet: “If information really is the lifeblood of modern organisations, then CIOs could create huge benefits from opening their data to new, creative pairs of eyes. Research from consultant McKinsey suggests that seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data: that is, taking previously proprietary data (often starting with public sector data) and opening up access.
So, should your business consider giving outsiders access to insider information? ZDNet speaks to three experts.
More viewpoints can mean better results
Former Tullow Oil CIO Andrew Marks says debates about the potential openness of data in a private sector context are likely to be dominated by one major concern: information security.
“It’s a perfectly reasonable debate until people start thinking about privacy,” he says. “Putting information at risk, both in terms of customer data and competitive advantage, will be a risk too far for many senior executives.”
But what if CIOs could allay c-suite peers’ concerns and create a new opportunity? Marks points to the Goldcorp Challenge, which saw the mining specialist share its proprietary geological data to allow outside experts pick likely spots for mining. The challenge, which included prize money of $575,000 helped identify more than 110 sites, 50 per cent of which were previously unknown to the company. The value of gold found through the competition exceeded $6bn. Marks wonders whether other firms could take similarly brave steps.
“There is a period of time when information is very sensitive,” he says. “Once the value of data starts to become finite, then it might be beneficial for businesses to open the doors and to let outsiders play with the information. That approach, in terms of gamification, might lead to the creation of new ideas and innovations.”…
Marks says these projects help prove that, when it comes to data, more is likely to mean different – and possibly better – results. “Whether using big data algorithms or the human touch, the more viewpoints you bring together, the more you can increases chances of success and reduce risk,” he says.
“There is, therefore, always likely to be value in seeking an alternative perspective. Opening access to data means your firm is going to get more ideas, but CIOs and other senior executives need to think very carefully about what such openness means for the business, and the potential benefits.”….Some leading firms are already taking steps towards openness. Take Christina Scott, chief product and information officer at the Financial Times, who says the media organisation has used data analysts to help push the benefits of information-led insight across the business.
Her team has democratised data in order to make sure that all parts of the organisation can get the information they need to complete their day-to-day jobs. Scott says the approach is best viewed as an open data strategy, but within the safe confines of the existing enterprise firewall. While the tactic is internally focused currently, Scott says the FT is keen to find ways to make the most of external talent in the future.
“We’re starting to consider how we might open data beyond the organisation, too,” she says. “Our data holds a lot of value and insight, including across the metadata we’ve created. So it would be great to think about how we could use that information in a more open way.” Part of the FT’s business includes trade-focused magazines. Scott says opening the data could provide new insight to its B2B customers across a range of sectors. In fact, the firm has already dabbled at a smaller scale.
“We’ve run hackathons, where we’ve exposed our APIs and given people the chance to come up with some new ideas,” she says. “But I don’t think we’ve done as much work on open data as we could. And I think that’s the direction in which better organisations are moving. They recognise that not all innovation is going to happen within the company.”…
CIO Omid Shiraji is another IT expert who recognises that there is a general move towards a more open society. Any executive who expects to work within a tightly defined enterprise firewall is living in cloud cuckoo land, he argues. More to the point, they will miss out on big advantages.
“If you can expose your sources to a range of developers, you can start to benefit from massive innovation,” he says. “You can get really big benefits from opening your data to external experts who can focus on areas that you don’t have the capability to develop internally.”
Many IT leaders would like to open data to outside experts, suggests Shiraji. For CIOs who are keen to expose their sources, he suggests letting small-scale developers take a close look at in-house data silos in an attempt to discover what relationships might exist and what advantages could accrue….(More)”
Peter Williams, Jan Gravesen and Trinette Brownhill in Government Executive: “Governments around the world are facing competitive pressures and expectations from their constituents that are prompting them to innovate and dissolve age-old structures. Many governments have introduced a digital strategy in which at least one of the goals is aimed at bringing their organizations closer to citizens and businesses.
To achieve this, ideally IT and data in government would not be constrained by the different functional towers that make up the organization, as is often the case. They would not be constrained by complex, monolithic application design philosophies and lengthy implementation cycles, nor would development be constrained by the assumption that all activity has to be executed by the government itself.
Instead, applications would be created rapidly and cheaply, and modules would be shared as reusable blocks of code and integrated data. It would be relatively straightforward to integrate data from multiple departments to enable a focus on the complex needs of, say, a single parent who is diabetic and a student. Delivery would be facilitated in the manner best required, or preferred, by the citizen. Third parties would also be able to access these modules of code and data to build higher value government services that multiple agencies would then buy into. The code would run on a cloud infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency in which processing resources are used.
GaaP an organized set of ideas and principles that allows organizations to approach these ideals. It allows governments to institute more efficient sharing of IT resources as well as unlock data and functionality via application programming interfaces to allow third parties to build higher value citizen services. In doing so, security plays a crucial role protecting the privacy of constituents and enterprise assets.
We see increasingly well-established examples of GaaP services in many parts of the world. The notion has significantly influenced strategic thinking in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In particular, it has evolved in a deliberate way in the UK’s Government Data Services, building on the Blairite notion of “joined up government”; in Australia’s e-government strategy and its myGov program; and as a significant influencer in Singapore’s entire approach to building its “smarter nation” infrastructure.
Collaborative Government
GaaP assumes a transformational shift in efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, in which agencies move toward a collaborative government and away from today’s siloed approach. That collaboration may be among agencies, but also with other entities (nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, citizens, etc.).
GaaP’s focus on collaboration enables public agencies to move away from their traditional towered approach to IT and increasingly make use of shared and composable services offered by a common – usually a virtualized, cloud-enabled – platform. This leads to more efficient use of development resources, platforms and IT support. We are seeing examples of this already with a group of townships in New York state and also with two large Spanish cities that are embarking on this approach.
While efficient resource and service sharing is central to the idea of GaaP, it is not sufficient. The idea is that GaaP must allow app developers, irrespective of whether they are citizens, private organizations or other public agencies, to develop new value-added services using published government data and APIs. In this sense, the platform becomes a connecting layer between public agencies’ systems and data on the one hand, and private citizens, organizations and other public agencies on the other.
In its most fundamental form, GaaP is able to:
It is the openness, the secure interoperability, and the ability to compose new services on the basis of existing services and data that define the nature of the platform.
The Challenges
At one time, the challenge of creating a GaaP structure would have been technology: Today, it is governance….(More)”
Louise Pakseresht at Royal Society’s “Verba”: “We live in an era of data. The world is generating 1.7 million billion bytes of data every minute and the total amount of global data is expected to grow 40% year on year for the next decade (PDF). In 2003 scientists declared the mapping of the human genome complete. It took over 10 years and cost $1billion – today it takes mere days and can be done at a fraction of the cost.
Making the most of the data revolution will be key to future scientific and economic progress. Unlocking the value of data by improving the way that we collect, analyse and use data has the potential to improve lives across a multitude of areas, ranging from business to health, and from tackling climate change to aiding civic engagement. However, its potential for public benefit must be balanced against the need for data to be used intelligently and with respect for individuals’ privacy.
Getting regulation right
The UK Data Protection Act was transposed into UK law following the 1995 European Data Protection Directive. This was at a time before wide-spread use of internet and smartphones. In 2012, recognising the pace of technological change, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive reform of EU data protection rules including a new Data Protection Regulation that would update and harmonise these rules across the EU.
The draft regulation is currently going through the EU legislative process. During this, the European Parliament has proposed changes to the Commission’s text. These changes have raised concerns for researchers across Europe that the Regulation could risk restricting the use of personal data for research which could prevent much vital health research. For example, researchers currently use these data to better understand how to prevent and treat conditions such as cancer, diabetes and dementia. The final details of the regulation are now being negotiated and the research community has come together to highlight the importance of data in research and articulate their concerns in a joint statement, which the Society supports.
The Society considers that datasets should be managed according to a system of proportionate governance. Personal data should only be shared if it is necessary for research with the potential for high public value and should be proportionate to the particular needs of a research project. It should also draw on consent, authorisation and safe havens – secure sites for databases containing sensitive personal data that can only be accessed by authorised researchers – as appropriate…..
However, many challenges remain that are unlikely to be resolved in the current European negotiations. The new legislation covers personal data but not anonymised data, which are data that have had information that can identify persons removed or replaced with a code. The assumption is that anonymisation is a foolproof way to protect personal identity. However, there have been examples of reidentification from anonymised data and computer scientists have long pointed out the flaws of relying on anonymisation to protect an individual’s privacy….There is also a risk of leaving the public behind with lack of information and failed efforts to earn trust; and it is clear that a better understanding of the role of consent and ethical governance is needed to ensure the continuation of cutting edge research which respects the principles of privacy.
These are problems that will require attention, and questions that the Society will continue to explore. …(More)”
Alexis C. Madrigal at Fusion: “…There’s this amazing book called Seeing Like a State, which shows how governments and other big institutions try to reduce the vast complexity of the world into a series of statistics that their leaders use to try to comprehend what’s happening.
The author, James C. Scott, opens the book with an extended anecdote about the Normalbaum. In the second half of the 18th century, Prussian rulers wanted to know how many “natural resources” they had in the tangled woods of the country. So, they started counting. And they came up with these huge tables that would let them calculate how many board-feet of wood they could pull from a given plot of forest. All the rest of the forest, everything it did for the people and the animals and general ecology of the place was discarded from the analysis.
But the world proved too unruly. Their data wasn’t perfect. So they started creating new forests, the Normalbaum, planting all the trees at the same time, and monoculturing them so that there were no trees in the forest that couldn’t be monetized for wood. “The fact is that forest science and geometry, backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques,” Scott wrote.
The spreadsheet became the world! They even planted the trees in rows, like a grid.
German foresters got very scientific with their fertilizer applications and management practices. And the scheme really worked—at least for a hundred years. Pretty much everyone across the world adopted their methods.
“In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted,” Scott wrote.
The complex ecosystem that underpinned the growth of these trees through generations—all the microbial and inter-species relationships—were torn apart by the rigor of the Normalbaum. The nutrient cycles were broken. Resilience was lost. The hidden underpinnings of the world were revealed only when they were gone. The Germans, like they do, came up with a new word for what happened: Waldsterben, or forest death.
Sometimes, when I look out at our world—at the highest level—in which thin data have come to stand in for huge complex systems of human and biological relationships, I wonder if we’re currently deep in the Normalbaum phase of things, awaiting the moment when Waldsterbensets in.
Take the ad-supported digital media ecosystem. The idea is brilliant: capture data on people all over the web and then use what you know to show them relevant ads, ads they want to see. Not only that, but because it’s all tracked, unlike broadcast or print media, an advertiser can measure what they’re getting more precisely. And certainly the digital advertising market has grown, taking share from most other forms of media. The spreadsheet makes a ton of sense—which is one reason for the growth predictions that underpin the massive valuations of new media companies.
But scratch the surface, like Businessweek recently did, and the problems are obvious. A large percentage of the traffic to many stories and videos consists of software pretending to be human.
“The art is making the fake traffic look real, often by sprucing up websites with just enough content to make them appear authentic,” Businessweek says. “Programmatic ad-buying systems don’t necessarily differentiate between real users and bots, or between websites with fresh, original work, and Potemkin sites camouflaged with stock photos and cut-and-paste articles.”
Of course, that’s not what high-end media players are doing. But the cheap programmatic ads, fueled by fake traffic, drive down the pricesacross the digital media industry, making it harder to support good journalism. Meanwhile, users of many sites are rebelling against the business model by installing ad blockers.
The advertisers and ad-tech firms just wanted to capture user data to show them relevant ads. They just wanted to measure their ads more effectively. But placed into the real-world, the system that grew up around these desires has reshaped the media landscape in unpredictable ways.
We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking data is a camera, but it’s really an engine. Capturing data about something changes the way that something works. Even the mere collection of stats is not a neutral act, but a way of reshaping the thing itself….(More)”
