Last night I attended a Policy Exchange event on “The Big Data Opportunity” with the byline “Making government faster, smarter and more personal”. The speakers were Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office; James Petter, VP & UK MD, EMC; and Chris Yiu, Head of Digital Government at the Policy Exchange. The event was to launch a new Policy Exchange/EMC report, which seeks to reveal the attitudes towards, knowledge of, and buying plans around, the use of ‘Big Data’ in the UK’s public and private sectors.
I had quite happily contributed to the press release stating: “The potential of ‘Big Data’ analytics in the public sector shouldn’t be underestimated. For example, it isn’t hard to envisage better policy making through improved social science research, better NHS outcomes through improved use of patient data, or savings to the public purse as a result of increased fraud detection”. I stand by this. I think the potential benefits are huge. The Policy Exchange report claims that £33bn a year could be saved from public spending without cutting services if the government made better use of data already in the system.
However, while ‘Big Data’ has its place (and certainly has its applications in the UK public sector), all too often the debate around ‘Big Data’ falls into a debate simply about ‘data’ – about better data collection, better data management, better data analysis, better data use and more data transparency. And that is not the same thing. This happened in last night’s presentation and debate, with much talk about ‘open data’, ‘open government’ and ‘data transparency’. At one point, for example, Francis Maude talked about the need to understand the number of Civil Servants (something which apparently hasn’t always been seen as a core piece of management information, but which is now fundamental!). That’s not ‘Big Data’. Indeed I fear the "£33bn" estimate may well go far beyond the boundaries of the true definition of 'Big Data'.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with talking about other data issues. Indeed, Government has a lot to talk about. There is still much that needs to be done in terms of, for example, finding a way to enable departments and agencies to share data more easily, or making management information comparable between different departments and agencies. That’s all incredibly important. But ‘Big Data’ is about dealing with petabytes and zettabytes of data; levels that couldn’t possibly be computed by the human brain or by traditional database management tools. There is absolutely no need to put the ‘Big Data’ label on everything.
I had an interesting conversation with ex Deputy CIO, Bill McCluggage (now at EMC), after the event and he certainly ‘gets it’. And is incredibly enthusiastic about the potential benefits of really getting to grips with the issue. The problem is that he is one of the many ‘dearly departed’ that have left the Cabinet Office for pastures new in the private sector. The Policy Exchange report states that only 46% of public sector respondents to their survey could identify the correct definition of ‘Big Data’. Hopefully that won’t stop the potential benefits being realised.