Best Practice: Develop and Implement a Cross Agency Strategy

Challenge

Different agencies in the public sector develop and implement their own strategy. These different strategies are unconnected so it is hard to apply central planning and evaluation.

Solution

There needs to be a strategy that coordinates the efforts of multiple agencies.

Why is this a Best Practice? What’s the impact of the Best Practice

Different agencies can understand what is required, plan accordingly and measure progress.

Links to the Revised PSI Directive

Policies and Legislation

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

Having a strategic plan is essential for decision makers at the highest level, i.e. ministers, to support an approach to implementation. Both the G8 Open Data Charter, published in 2013, and the Shakespeare Review of Public Sector Information, emphasised the need for a clear, visible, auditable plan for publishing data as quickly as possible, defined both by bottom-up market demand and by top-down strategic thinking, overcoming institutional and technical obstacles with a twin-track process which combines speed to market with improvement of quality:

• an ‘early even if imperfect’ track that is very broad and very aggressively driven, and
• a ‘National Core Reference Data’ high-quality track which begins immediately but narrowly;

and then moving things from Track 1 to Track 2 as quickly as we can do reliably and to a high standard. ‘Quickly’ should be set out by government through publicly committed target dates.

What do you need for this Best Practice?

• Give responsibility to an individual civil servant or department for developing the plan.
• Convene a meeting, or a series of meetings, between stakeholders - data producers, data users etc.
• Develop the plan through an iterative process before seeking high level endorsement.