Will your council work with us in 2022 to assess and improve your use of data?
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A 2022 project of shared working to improve a better understanding and use of data in local government |
How well does your council use data for decision-making? The LGA is looking for councils to partner with us to trial the use of a data maturity self-assessment tool. We would welcome councils at any stage of maturity from the data unaware to data masters. The results will enable you to assess where you are on your data journey and plan the next steps of your evolution. You will also be able to compare yourself across different functional areas and against other councils. The findings will encourage conversation on the data needs of councils and how we can work collectively to raise standards and to improve cultural and work practices. The project is being funded by grant from the UK Government.
The maturity of data use in local government is becoming more and more important as we look back at our responses to emergencies such as the pandemic and the Ukraine refugee crises. The subject is increasing in priority within Government and our sector is being encouraged to review and take stock of our governance and work practices using data. This work is timely as our sector has lost many traditional data analytics skills and capacity through ten years of austerity.
We are looking to assemble a cohort of councils in 2022 to work with us and experiment how we might measure the maturity of data use and determine how we might develop strategies to share our findings and offer practical support for improvement.
Are you able to offer your council to work with us with this project?
We will be deploying our data maturity self-assessment tool to measure your council’s understanding and use of data. This data maturity model was developed with Nesta and inputs from several regional local government workshops where priorities, needs, ideas were explored. It is intended to be very light touch, easy to understand and not requiring detailed data analytics knowledge to participate.
We will require you to assemble several volunteers within your council to work with you and us to undertake the self-assessment. The more participants the better but we would hope to include representatives from different functional areas within the council and participants from different officer levels and elected members.
The self-assessment tool is easy to use and takes no more than 10-15 minutes to complete. It involves a series of short questions on five key themes on the use of data, cultural issues in your organisation, your management processes, skills and governance strategy. It works like the approach to psychometric testing. The answers feed into visual and textual indications of how well your use of data is developed. By combining the opinions of all participants, it is intended to stimulate conversations amongst your participants and amongst the cohort of councils that takes part.
It compares your answers with the perceptions of others in your organisation and between organisations in our sector. It provides suggestions for your council’s next steps on the improvement journey. Above all, we hope that it engenders a discussion about your use of data – both within your teams and within the wider local government data community.
Please register you interest to participate with Tim Adams at the LGA who will be in touch again shortly and invite you to a short launch presentation to explain more details about the project and the use of the self-assessment tool.