Overview
A variety of metrics should be used at different levels of the organisation to assess the value and impact of sharing PSI.
Why
Sharing PSI requires effort and effort costs money. Budget holders will, of course, need strong justification for spending any money on making data available - an activity that, from their perspective, is likely to be new. The PSI Directive mandates that data should be available for free or at marginal cost, that is, making the data available cannot itself be a revenue generator although charges may be levied to cover the difference between keeping the data within the organisation and making it available.
If the only metric applied is whether the department that generates and shares the data receives financial compensation for doing so, then the assessment is very likely to be unfavourable. However, a range of other metrics taken at a higher level will often show significant benefits to the organisation as a whole, such as greater efficiency, improved fulfillment of the public task and increased transparency.
Intended outcome
Assessment of the value and impact of sharing public sector information should be made at a level above the individual department(s) responsible for doing so.
Possible Approach
How this is done will depend very much on the specific circumstances but typically it means that the assessment is carried out against the whole cross-agency plan. Some individual departments, or sub-departments, are likely to see increased costs with no direct benefit to that department but at a higher level, the benefits should be evident and measurable. Factors to bear in mind include, but are not limited to:
- the reduction in time spent dealing with individual requests for information;
- the reduction in the load on the Web site due to the elimination of traffic from screen scrapers;
- improved delivery of services, perhaps including new services;
- improved transparency, perhaps measured by the number of news items referring to published information;
- improved data quality due to more users able to detect errors;
All these in addition to the typical metrics of the number of downloads of a particular dataset and the number of external applications built on top of the data. Bear in mind that a single useful application can have substantially more impact than a large number of trivial ones.
How to Test
Is the assessment of the provision of PSI done at a sufficiently high level to measure an overall effect, taking into account, but not limited to, individual small-scale budgets.
Evidence
Evidence to support this best practice is recorded in the report on the Share-PSI workshop in Samos, June-July 2014.
Lifecycle Stage
Refinement
Audience
Department heads, project managers.