Understanding the state of local government data

For Digital Leaders Week 2021, we joined our client Devon County Council and our partner Peak Indicators to discuss the how the Smarter Devon program – alongside Solidatus and Peak – is meeting the Council’s human and technical challenges around compliance and data governance. They looked at the following points:

• Devon County Council goal was to democratize information about data by transferring understanding from human brains into a knowledge-sharing tool
• The Council’s focus areas were Information Compliance and Data Management, with two areas of challenges: Human and Technical
• Solidatus was brought in by partner Peak Indicators to embed data journey mapping across the organization, develop a metadata framework and ensure data quality that improved projects and led to better business decisions
• This resulted in confidence in the organizational data and reporting measures on a Technical level, and enabled cultural change on a Human level

Devon County Council faced a number of obstacles when it came to their data due to compliance and data protection laws. They needed to quickly understand how they were processing personal data, what information assets they had, which data sources were attributable, who was responsible, who was using the data and where it was going – that’s where lineage plays a crucial role.

After working closely with our partner Peak Indicators, Devon County Council engaged Solidatus to help them map out their data discovery. Solidatus made it possible for the Council to visualize the flow of their metadata throughout the organization, giving them the opportunity to share important knowledge between teams. Solidatus Customer Success Manager Bipin Mistry commented, “The benefit of having that information is that you retain knowledge within the company – it isn’t walking out of the door with a person anymore.”

The Solidatus solution is simple: discover data, visualize it, and act upon it.