Navigating the ever-expanding data lake takes education, technology, broader perspectives

When it comes to data, it’s no longer just the three “Vs” — volume, veracity and velocity — that agencies have to worry about.

What the last three-plus years have shown, there now is a fourth consideration that public and private sector organizations must consider: Definition.

Jackie Taylor, the US government public sector alliance leader for EY, said the need to understand, describe and explain who or what you are focused on is especially true around health and equity data.

“In addition to looking at physical health and wellness as a quotient, folks are looking at public safety. That is now a health issue. They’re looking at social justice issues, and its mental health implications as a health issue,” Taylor said on the discussion, Government Modernization Unleashed: The Power of Data. “I think from a broad perspective, we realize that diaspora of what health equity encompasses has definitely expanded. The challenge is we are used to working in siloes as human beings, as government entities and organizations, and we were accustomed to having our mission, having our mandate and working toward that. Now the challenges we’re facing are requiring us to collaborate. They are requiring us to look outside of our four walls, and tap into information, processes and people, quite frankly, that are outside of the buildings that we’re used to being in.”

Agencies need to “remove their collection blinders” and continually expand how they interact with stakeholders. Taylor said this means reaching out external communities and citizens as well as organizations that may already be collecting key data elements.

“From a public safety standpoint, there is sharing of data and progressive conversations around police data with healthcare data with community based data, to pull those things together in order to make informed decisions to lower crime and to address public safety,” she said. “Then, of course, from a capacity standpoint, we’re having numerous conversations in different cities around hospital availability, where are those hospitals located, access to the hospitals, ambulatory care capacity and bed capacity and what that looks like, and we need data in order to be productive in those conversations, but those are happening now.”

Education and technology goals

This need to step outside the box of how and who agencies collect data from also means technology leaders have to rethink how they use technology differently to meet those goals.

Taylor said a lot of the technology discussions are as much about educating mission owners and leaders about what is possible as it is about implementing new systems or applications.

“A lot of the challenges to this particular culture issue is with data sharing. I think is rooted in ignorance, and not in a bad way, just literally not knowing there are so many new acronyms and new terms and it’s scary for a leader to say, ‘I don’t want to go out there because I’m not really familiar with robotics process automation, or ChatGPT or what IoT even means, what is this internet of things anyways?’ So I think that there’s an enormous amount of education that first has to take place, bottoms up and tops down, so that we’re using the same terminology, and we’re all speaking the same language,” she said. “From a technology standpoint, now there is an opportunity for those leaders that want to be courageous, that want to move the needle in their organization and leverage data, to take advantage of that to get smarter, to get their team smarter and work together collaboratively toward that end result.”

The first step is getting an organization’s arms its data. Taylor said understanding what you have, where it’s coming from and how it’s being used today are key factors to moving toward stronger approach to data-driven decisions.

“Once that is rationalized, then we’re seeing them look out because they’re saying you know if I had X or Y data, we would be able to do some predictive analytics and we’ll be able to take it a step further,” she said. “Very often X and Y resides with an entity outside of your control so I’m seeing there’s an opportunity to leverage those external data sources. There’s also the challenge of getting access to that data and making sure that the data privacy controls are in place.”

What’s the problem you are trying to solve?

One example of managing data and then using it to drive decisions Taylor highlighted is combining Census data with zip code data to address health equity issues.

“You can look at where there may be food deserts or where there may be transportation issues. There are scenarios where if you put a highway in a certain location, you can create a segregation scenario within a certain geography,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to have that that holistic view of what where the data is, what the situation is in various geographies and then make your decisions accordingly.”

Additionally, Taylor said determining the question you are trying to answer first is just as important.

“It absolutely starts with determining what is the problem that we’re trying to solve? Then what are the data elements and the inputs that can help us get to that particular answer, or at least two or three different write solutions that we could possibly entertain?” she said. “I think the first step is to make sure you understand what you’re trying to solve, second, getting a handle on the data sources and what’s available in at your fingertips, and then the third piece, because it’s usually not cleaned and usually not consistent, is that rationalization process that needs to happen in order to get the analytics that you need to make decisions.”

Underlying all of these efforts, of course, is cybersecurity and privacy. Taylor said agencies must not only protect the data, but be transparent in how they are doing that.

“I see the cybersecurity conversations progressing even farther because you’re dealing with personal identification information (PII), you’re dealing with HIPAA, and you’re dealing with, depending upon if you’re working with youth and others, with youth-based information. Now the stakes are even higher because the data is even more sensitive, even from a public safety perspective, as it relates to health equity and priorities,” Taylor said. “When you have rigor around your governance and your process, you build confidence of those with whom you’re going to be working right from a data perspective. If they know that you have a rigorous governance, you have mitigation procedures in place. That goes a long way to building confidence for those that you need to work with. Many of our organizations are really looking to progress their cybersecurity efforts. That means they are going beyond just looking at emerging technologies that sometimes create openings. It’s also going to protect the data that you’re using for your decision making.”

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