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Transcript of 5 th July 2007 Mary Rowlatt Customer Relations Manager Management of PSI Information asset...
5th July 2007
Mary RowlattCustomer Relations Manager
Management of PSI
Information asset registries – a task too far?
2 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Introduction
• Support the underlying premise
– Paid for by taxation – should be available
• What sort of PSI local authorities hold
• Information asset registers
– Issues affecting their availability
– Why they are not enough
3 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
About Essex: • 1,300 square miles
• 1.4 million people
• 2nd largest English county authority
• Gross expenditure over £1.5 bn
• 300 miles of coastline
• Some industrial/development zones:
•Thames Gateway
•Haven Gateway
•Stansted/M11 corridor
•A12/Great Eastern corridor
• Some rural
• Two tier authority – 12 Districts, 2 Unitaries, Fire, Health and Police
4 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
PSI in local authoritiesWhat can we provide?
5 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Some examples:
• Planning data and planning constraints
• Waste sites, civic amenity sites
• Highways information, street lights, road maintenance schemes,
speed restrictions, speed cameras, public rights of way
• School catchment areas, pupil numbers and forecasts, first
languages
• County terrier (our buildings and land)
• Contract information, trading standards
6 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Mixture of data sets and textual information
• Landscape data – wildlife, SSSI, historic buildings and monuments,
conservation areas, flood data, contaminated land data, minerals
data – location, ownership, contracts, metrics, value
• Poultry farm locations (bird flu)
• Surveys, commissioned research
• Strategic plans – minerals, waste, roads, tourism, education, social
care
7 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Scale
• 39,000 staff
• Over 400 networked sites
• Over 200 servers (plus DMSs, shared filing systems, shared
drives, personal drives, C drives …)
• Systems audit – just under 500 identified so far (in 9 months
…) plus unknown number of databases
• Very costly to construct and maintain a complete register
8 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Who owns the
rights?
• Many of our data sets (e.g. school catchment areas) are digitised
to OS maps/location data
– OS claim this is derived data …
• Shared data – partnership working or local enhancements of
government data
• Different levels of government
– Districts – rating (business and council tax)
– Address data – failure of National Spatial Address Infrastructure project
9 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Confusing
legislation – what should be included?
• General:
– Not all our information included – exemptions to the regulations
– Supply of Goods and Services
• Educational publications and software for use by other authorities
– What is the ‘public task’?
• Specific areas:
– For Trading Standards – the new Enterprise Act overrides FOI (and
PSI?) in that it prevents them disclosing information obtained using their
powers (although old Consumer Protection Act allowed it)
10 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Personal data
• We can’t supply personal data
• But much of our data could be useful if depersonalised –
trends etc
– Library usage (loans and electronic resources) by age, ethnicity,
geographic area
– Service usage
– Prosecutions
• Cost, trust
11 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Lack of
information management/standards
• Data quality often poor (names)
• Version control poor
• Lack of knowledge or agreement about standards and formats
• Non-existent or poor metadata
• Antipathy to metadata (the Google effect)
• Lack of agreement around metadata standards
– Elements
– Encoding schemes
• Subject vs category vs navigation vs file plans
• (GCL, LGCL, IPSV, etc)
• Cost (even if automate parts)
12 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Asset registry issues: Aggregation
issues
• Multiply previous list by each country
• Add language issues
• Who provides/funds/manages the aggregation and
portals?
• Who agrees and implements the standards?
13 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
OPSI encouragement and guidance on asset
registries will help but …
• Essex was first local authority accredited under IFTS
• As OPSI are now suggesting we worked on basis of
building aspects of IAR into our FOI list of publications
and aligning PSI policy & practice with approaches
agreed for FOI & related access to information
legislation
14 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Despite this
• We have been unable to persuade senior managers
and politicians to authorise resources to:
– Carry out an audit of data sets to augment our publications
scheme
– Or even update our publications scheme
– Never mind further development (one stop online shop)
15 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Sadly we are not unique
• Previously illustrated some of the technical difficulties
we face in constructing asset registries
• But there is also a bigger picture to be considered …
16 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
The bigger picture:
• Awareness of PSI requirements in local authorities (at
any level) is very low and patchy
• Even if aware - meeting the requirements is given a very
low priority (pitted against high profile requirements such
as waste and environment or rising public
demand/concern in areas such as social care, education)
17 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
The bigger picture (2)
• Very poor understanding of what sort of PSI might be
capable of re-use
– Lack of innovation, ideas and initiatives re: PSI
• Concerns about access to information and social inclusion
• Conflict between pressures to generate income and PSI
• Amateur business models
18 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
The bigger picture (3)
• Consequent difficulty in achieving resources (time,
budget, staff) to meet the requirements
• Which inhibits the development and implementation of
the necessary tools, techniques and mechanisms e.g:– information management (inc data quality)
– document management
– asset registers
– standards and interoperability
– portals, search engines and finding mechanisms
19 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
In short
• ‘Technical’ difficulties around asset registries
• Significant costs
• Low priority
• We have not had one request under PSI Regulations
since they came into force
20 Essex County Council
Enabling the re-use of PSI
Is it sensible to focus on trying to make the
whole public sector create asset registries?
• Central government agencies have the richest pickings
• Focus on them?
• Power of Information Recommendation 8. Web based
channel to gather & assess requests for PSI. Use this to
inform creation of targeted asset registry for lower levels
of government?