Better data quality benefits local government

Data insights have transformed modern business over the past decade. By investing in data capture, quality, analytics and application, companies can better understand existing and potential customers, and subsequently make smarter decisions. However, one of the biggest challenges for businesses is that data is still largely siloed and patchy. It is also rarely shared across the business and its quality remains highly questionable.

Today data is considered a primary business driver that extends across customer service to marketing and sales, the supply chain, planning and strategic decision-making. According to Gartner, the business information and analytics market in Australia is forecast to reach $700 million this year, up 9.1% from last year.

In terms of services provided by the state, data quality has played a critical role in understanding citizen needs and interactions. By increasing value to the community through improved service provision, the three tiers of government can drive efficiencies through smarter approaches while embracing a digital strategy and meeting citizen demand.

Yet local government authorities in particular continue to face a number of challenges in ensuring data quality, including rapidly and constantly changing populations and the need to deliver more complex services. Moreover, the proliferation of communication technologies has fractured old models of citizen engagement, increasing their expectations and the requirement to meet needs in real time.
Worryingly, a recent survey conducted by Civica in partnership with Experian Data Quality found that 88% of local authorities across Australia and New Zealand lacked complete visibility into their data. Meanwhile the existence of incomplete, outdated and duplicate data is considered a major problem. According to the report, the biggest external barriers to achieving data quality include poor data capture and validation, data standardisation and cleansing, and the inability to manage the variety and diversity of data effectively.

To put the problem into context, in an improperly maintained database, one in four records is inaccurate, with that number increasing year on year. This margin of error multiplies with the number of contact databases, with Australian and New Zealand local authorities each managing eight on average.
Moreover, almost two-thirds of local authorities in Australia and New Zealand still rely to some degree on manual input by using tools such as Excel. As manual-entry tools allow free-form data entry, the likelihood of non-standardised and incompatible records being entered in multiple ways is a real risk.
Adding to the issue of inconsistent data entries, seven in 10 local authorities indicate that individual departments exercise full or partial control over their own data strategies, highlighting a lack of centralised data management.

It almost goes without saying that a major barrier to business-level insight in local government is data quality. The quality of citizen insight and consequently the effectiveness of local authorities are directly proportional to the quality of citizen data used. Data of poor quality will only likely ever deliver poor services.

To harness data quality and deliver a good customer experience, local authorities need to act fast, not least to meet growing expectations. The fact is that citizens are getting more and more used to immediacy, accessibility and effectiveness in every interaction. According to Roy Morgan research, more than 1 in 8 Australians aged 14 years and over will look up government information and services online over any four-week period.

There is an obvious and urgent need for local authorities, at the very least, to begin planning the ways in which they tie together data and identify where they will access specialist data expertise. As many private businesses have already discovered, specialised support is a wise investment given the complexities involved in data strategy and project implementation.

Additionally, carefully constructed data strategies are crucial to success, allowing local authorities to argue a business case, set goals, manage expectations, establish KPIs, map investments to returns and secure executive leadership.

The good news is that the transformation witnessed in the business world can be replicated and scaled across local government. There is huge potential for local authorities to profit from the experience of the businesses that have blazed the data-insight trail.