Article by Ruth Kelly: “…Government needs to work on its digital foundations. The extent of legacy IT systems across government is huge. Many were designed and built for a previous business era, and still rely on paper-based processes. Historic neglect and a lack of asset maintenance has added to the difficulty. Because many systems are not compatible, sharing data across systems requires manual extraction which is risky and costly. All this adds to problems with data quality. Government suffers from data which is incomplete, inconsistent, inaccessible, difficult to process and not easily shareable. A lack of common data models, both between and within government departments, makes it difficult and costly to combine different sources of data, and significant manual effort is required to make data usable. Some departments have told us that they spend 60% to 80% of their time on cleaning data when carrying out analysis.
Why is this an issue for AI? Large volumes of good-quality data are important for training, testing and deploying AI models. Poor data leads to poor outcomes, especially where it involves personal data. Access to good-quality data was identified as a barrier to implementing AI by 62% of the 87 government bodies responding to our survey. Simple productivity improvements that provide integration with routine administration (for example summarising documents) is already possible, but integration with big, established legacy IT is a whole other long-term endeavour. Layering new technology on top of existing systems, and reusing poor-quality and aging data, carries the risk of magnifying problems and further embedding reliance on legacy systems…(More)”