https://ift.tt/UiKH6IC
For a small agency, the Ministry of Transport appears to get good IT support, however, uneven investment across the transport system has created data blockages.
A performance improvement review by the Public Service Commission published last week found the ministry had an IT strategy and architecture underpinned by a shift to cloud-based services and applications.
Operational IT, project, and cybersecurity resources were managed through outsourced partnerships and this approach seemed to be working well: service and hardware were both viewed positively by staff.
“The ministry appears to get good IT support for a small agency at a reasonable cost,” the review found.
However, it also found arrangements for data access and sharing systems within the transport system were not as effective as they could be.
“The most significant opportunity for the ministry is leveraging data that already exists within the transport system, such as that held by the transport Crown entities,” the review noted.
“Gathering this data into one accessible place would provide a valuable resource for its own analysts and the wider transport system.”
While there was was positive progress in the data and evidence area, agencies that hold data for regulatory or other legitimate public service reasons were often reluctant to provide data access for policy development and research, despite this being catered for in law.
“Negotiations between legal teams (not data practitioners) have required specific use cases to be specified for access (e.g. a single policy question) rather than providing access for open policy research, analytics or insights purposes,” the report found.
“There are also concerns on the level of assurance on IT security, and of analytical teams’ access and use of private and confidential records.”
Uneven IT investment across the transport system had driven barriers in data sharing because many significant data sets were held on or supported by legacy systems and contractors.
While this might be efficient within the Crown entity, it made access by the Ministry of Transport difficult.
“If the Ministry gains access to this information, it then must clean, store, and manage the data which can create double handling.”
Possible solutions included increasing the transparency of data governance and security, including IT arrangements and employee accountability and the provision of curated data sets which could be anonymised but still retain important information such as travel patterns and location.
Open data sets were a “really positive” initiative which could open the door to analysis of government data from third parties and the private sector.
“However, these typically strip out most of the information required to undertake any advanced policy analysis (e.g. equity) within government,” the review noted.
Other mechanisms to enable broader data analysis, such as memorandums of understanding and assured information sharing agreements, often required significant management.
“The ministry and NZTA have investigated this in the past but the project was stopped largely due to lack of resources,” the report noted.
The commission recommended the ministry prioritised and led a transport system-wide approach to data and analytics, building from work already underway.
This includes developments such as Project Monty, an agency-based model of how people and businesses travel under different scenarios, a Transport Evidence Base Strategy and a Transport Knowledge Hub.
This approach could include a ‘transport data hub’ operated and shared across the whole transport system, but which may or may not be inside the ministry.