The need to respond to civil contingencies – from floods or 'flu pandemics to terrorism – is prompting public organisations to look again at how they gather and share data.
Geographic information is being used extensively by those planning security for the London 2012 Olympics, for example. But geographic information is also at its most effective when it supports, rather than supplants, the insights and experience of those on the ground.
During the 2007 floods, communities lost fresh water supplies because the electricity supply to water treatment plants was disrupted. But geographic information alone would not have linked a substation failure to the treatment plant, the need is for geographic intelligence which amongst other factors requires local insights.
We recently gathered a panel of experts to discuss the challenges faced by the public sector when it comes to gathering, and handling, location
information.
As last November's report by the Geographic Information Panel pointed out, too little government information (which it quoted 85 percent) is location based and is not being either connected or shared.
Improved risk management
The Place Matters report sets out a framework for using geographic information in the UK public sector, which it says will lead to better planning, improved risk management and better use of public sector resources. At the moment, though, such information is difficult to assemble or analyse reliably and there is too much duplication and too little re-use of the data.
One reason is that public sector organisations and departments tend to collect information solely for their own needs, without considering whether it can, or should, be shared. Too often, our panel suggested, the presumption is against sharing or linking data. There is a need for a paradigm change from "need to know" to "need to share".
The result, the experts suggest, is that decisions related to place might not be as well informed, or as effective, as they could be.
Given the state of the public finances, pressure can only grow to ensure that both the planning and execution of services are both efficient and effective. But unless public sector bodies consider location and know where to target their efforts, there is a real risk that spending will go to waste and not be fully optimised.
The experts and especially the geographers amongst them also believe that location information can be used to provide a much-needed boost to the economy, and promote "real efficiency gains" in public spending. This is especially the case in areas such as transport, where service improvements provide a significant economic multiplier effect.
Geographical information is also of enormous value to the private sector: property developers, retailers and farmers, need geographical information with to predict demand and fine-tune their offerings. The UK is a leading provider of geographical information systems (GIS) technologies and services, with location awareness a key part of our digital economy. But the public sector lags behind.
Sheer complexity of the situation
Central and local government holds spatial and location information for applications such as urban planning, providing services and for contingency and disaster planning. In addition, a vast amount of geographical information is collected every year by organisations such as the Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, the Environment Agency and even, through VAT returns and valuations, bodies such as the Treasury. However, for organisations that do share data it is the sheer complexity of the situation that often frustrates users: chargeable data is often well promoted but prohibitively expensive while free data is often hidden away and difficult to access. Our panel heard that from both a provider and consumer point of view it is difficult to ascertain what should be free of price and free to access.
However, such information is rarely shared, let alone connected. As a result organisations either have to assemble – and pay for – data that already exist elsewhere in the public sector, or plan services with less than full information.
"Part of the message of the location strategy is about developing good behaviour. It should not be 'not need to know' with data but 'need to share'," said one participant. There should be a culture of data sharing, albeit with the appropriate security and privacy safeguards.
Achieving this cultural shift, however, will take both time and resources. One reason is that collecting location data is expensive, and departments might not receive incentives for sharing – or even lose revenues by doing so.
Another, significant expense lies in maintaining data sets; a third comes in correlating information or putting it into a standardised format that other organisations can interpret. The Location Strategy report found that users of geographic information spend 80 percent of their time on collating and managing data and just 20 percent on analysis.
Or, as another expert puts it: "It is not just about location but about understanding what's happening – the who, what where and when. It is more sophisticated than just where events happen within a geo-location polygon."
This roundtable was sponsored by ESRI
