5 th July 2007 Mary Rowlatt Customer Relations Manager Management of PSI Information asset registries – a task too far?

5th July 2007

Mary RowlattCustomer Relations Manager

Management of PSI

Information asset registries – a task too far?

2 Essex County Council

Enabling the re-use of PSI

Introduction

• Support the underlying premise

– Paid for by taxation – should be available

• What sort of PSI local authorities hold

• Information asset registers

– Issues affecting their availability

– Why they are not enough



About Essex: • 1,300 square miles

• 1.4 million people

• 2nd largest English county authority

• Gross expenditure over £1.5 bn

• 300 miles of coastline

• Some industrial/development zones:

•Thames Gateway

•Haven Gateway

•Stansted/M11 corridor

•A12/Great Eastern corridor

• Some rural

• Two tier authority – 12 Districts, 2 Unitaries, Fire, Health and Police



PSI in local authoritiesWhat can we provide?



Some examples:

• Planning data and planning constraints

• Waste sites, civic amenity sites

• Highways information, street lights, road maintenance schemes,

speed restrictions, speed cameras, public rights of way

• School catchment areas, pupil numbers and forecasts, first

languages

• County terrier (our buildings and land)

• Contract information, trading standards



Mixture of data sets and textual information

• Landscape data – wildlife, SSSI, historic buildings and monuments,

conservation areas, flood data, contaminated land data, minerals

data – location, ownership, contracts, metrics, value

• Poultry farm locations (bird flu)

• Surveys, commissioned research

• Strategic plans – minerals, waste, roads, tourism, education, social

care



Asset registry issues: Scale

• 39,000 staff

• Over 400 networked sites

• Over 200 servers (plus DMSs, shared filing systems, shared

drives, personal drives, C drives …)

• Systems audit – just under 500 identified so far (in 9 months

…) plus unknown number of databases

• Very costly to construct and maintain a complete register



Asset registry issues: Who owns the

rights?

• Many of our data sets (e.g. school catchment areas) are digitised

to OS maps/location data

– OS claim this is derived data …

• Shared data – partnership working or local enhancements of

government data

• Different levels of government

– Districts – rating (business and council tax)

– Address data – failure of National Spatial Address Infrastructure project



Asset registry issues: Confusing

legislation – what should be included?

• General:

– Not all our information included – exemptions to the regulations

– Supply of Goods and Services

• Educational publications and software for use by other authorities

– What is the ‘public task’?

• Specific areas:

– For Trading Standards – the new Enterprise Act overrides FOI (and

PSI?) in that it prevents them disclosing information obtained using their

powers (although old Consumer Protection Act allowed it)



Asset registry issues: Personal data

• We can’t supply personal data

• But much of our data could be useful if depersonalised –

trends etc

– Library usage (loans and electronic resources) by age, ethnicity,

geographic area

– Service usage

– Prosecutions

• Cost, trust



Asset registry issues: Lack of

information management/standards

• Data quality often poor (names)

• Version control poor

• Lack of knowledge or agreement about standards and formats

• Non-existent or poor metadata

• Antipathy to metadata (the Google effect)

• Lack of agreement around metadata standards

– Elements

– Encoding schemes

• Subject vs category vs navigation vs file plans

• (GCL, LGCL, IPSV, etc)

• Cost (even if automate parts)



Asset registry issues: Aggregation

issues

• Multiply previous list by each country

• Add language issues

• Who provides/funds/manages the aggregation and

portals?

• Who agrees and implements the standards?



OPSI encouragement and guidance on asset

registries will help but …

• Essex was first local authority accredited under IFTS

• As OPSI are now suggesting we worked on basis of

building aspects of IAR into our FOI list of publications

and aligning PSI policy & practice with approaches

agreed for FOI & related access to information

legislation



Despite this

• We have been unable to persuade senior managers

and politicians to authorise resources to:

– Carry out an audit of data sets to augment our publications

scheme

– Or even update our publications scheme

– Never mind further development (one stop online shop)



Sadly we are not unique

• Previously illustrated some of the technical difficulties

we face in constructing asset registries

• But there is also a bigger picture to be considered …



The bigger picture:

• Awareness of PSI requirements in local authorities (at

any level) is very low and patchy

• Even if aware - meeting the requirements is given a very

low priority (pitted against high profile requirements such

as waste and environment or rising public

demand/concern in areas such as social care, education)



The bigger picture (2)

• Very poor understanding of what sort of PSI might be

capable of re-use

– Lack of innovation, ideas and initiatives re: PSI

• Concerns about access to information and social inclusion

• Conflict between pressures to generate income and PSI

• Amateur business models



The bigger picture (3)

• Consequent difficulty in achieving resources (time,

budget, staff) to meet the requirements

• Which inhibits the development and implementation of

the necessary tools, techniques and mechanisms e.g:– information management (inc data quality)

– document management

– asset registers

– standards and interoperability

– portals, search engines and finding mechanisms



In short

• ‘Technical’ difficulties around asset registries

• Significant costs

• Low priority

• We have not had one request under PSI Regulations

since they came into force



Is it sensible to focus on trying to make the

whole public sector create asset registries?

• Central government agencies have the richest pickings

• Focus on them?

• Power of Information Recommendation 8. Web based

channel to gather & assess requests for PSI. Use this to

inform creation of targeted asset registry for lower levels

of government?



Thank You

[email protected]

Documents

5 th July 2007 Mary Rowlatt Customer Relations Manager Management of PSI Information asset registries – a task too far?