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P U B L I C S E C T O R I N S I G H T SMODERNIZING GOVERNMENT FOR A DIGITAL WORLD

Modernizing government for a digital world

Public agencies around the world are finding new ways to share information with constituents–including data that may have previously been buried or hidden from view. In late 2014, OpenText met with eleven Canadian government agencies at municipal, provincial, and federal levels, for a “speed dating event” at the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC), in Ottawa, Canada. From sharing electoral maps and provincial school exam scores to managing geospatial data on mineral deposits, each agency presented its own unique challenges and ingenious solutions to enable data sharing with the public.

At GTEC 2014, the agencies OpenText spoke with are expanding the scope of the data they release online and seeing a corre-lated increase in public interest in that data. While they made great leaps since GTEC 2013, many agencies continue to be concerned about the quality of some data, contemplating the best ways to prepare it for prime-time release.

The GTEC agencies clearly demonstrated that across Canada, governments are seriously committed to transparency. Whether for political, sociological, or scientific reasons, they are releasing more of their accumulated data to the public, allowing everyone from citizens to planners, developers and entrepreneurs to use it for public betterment and profit. Not surprisingly, for a welcoming country like Canada, some of the most popular information on the government’s open data portal, open.canada.ca, comes from Citizenship and Immigration Canada according to our “date” with portal experts.

Opening up data to the public has two key benefits beyond simply building trust: meeting constituent needs and benefiting local and national economies. A great example of both was the launch of the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) contest, by the Canadian government. Designed to stimulate the use of government data for public good, the contest awards coders up to $40,000 for their efforts in developing helpful apps for the Canadian public. While the contest has seen the launch of apps like Canadian Travellers and A Healthier Commute, tracing the economic benefits of these apps remains a challenge.

Open Data—A step to the digital future

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P U B L I C S E C T O R I N S I G H T SMODERNIZING GOVERNMENT FOR A DIGITAL WORLD

Further, we have yet to see the rise of a successful Canadian Open Data-based app equivalent to SeeClickFix, the well-known and much used US mobile reporting venture. Although apps have the potential to offer cost-saving benefits for municipalities, agen-cies are still learning the lessons of how to improve their value to residents. For instance, when developers first used government owned mapping data to encourage pothole reporting, the effort floundered. Apparently, municipalities didn’t plan changes to the supporting processes required to actually fix the potholes in response to the rapid reporting. Such painful insights won’t stop such initiatives, though; they are only making the next ones better.

Why government agencies may limit the Open Data they releaseAcross Canada, while agencies hold volumes of digital data in various systems and applications, much remains on paper or in unstructured files like emails, Microsoft® Word and Excel® docu-ments, or PowerPoint® presentations. In fact, according to the International Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the leading experts on the topic, 80% of all government data is unstructured.1 This should be secured and reconciled with structured data, before it can be shared.

Governments and other public agencies are using Open Data to help build constituent trust. They are using it to answer everyday questions and stimulate new business, educational, and scientific opportunities at the municipal, provincial, and national levels.

Agencies need to move from aging legacy data sources to easily and broadly accessible repositories viewable from a single screen

Business Objects Structured Format Rendition Records Management Advanced Search

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P U B L I C S E C T O R I N S I G H T SMODERNIZING GOVERNMENT FOR A DIGITAL WORLD

Further, to gain value from any stored data, public agencies must ensure that what is released is clean, accurate, and free from Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Governments are commit-ted to securing personal and other sensitive data to maintain citizen trust. This is an essential component of any data transparency strategy and one many organizations struggle with when preparing to release unstructured data alongside structured data.

The same issues of accuracy, multiple versions, and privacy also pose challenges for agencies wanting to derive value from analytics, prepare data for migration, or decommission redundant systems. In all cases, “a single source of truth” across the organiza-tion is essential. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” is especially relevant for these purposes, since the derivative nature of data outcomes is wholly dependent on the accuracy and understand-ing of the source content.

Previously, when data was stored out of the public eye, minimal data management could live as a CIO’s deep, dark secret. This was frequently the case at countless government agencies as well as in the corporate world. In the past two years, however, government CIOs with support from CTOs and Chief Data Officers (CDOs), have moved data governance to the top of their investment priorities for the first time in this decade. Open Data is only one of the factors stimulating this trend.

In fact, there are three key reasons why they are investing in information governance to support Open Data as well as other high-profile data-driven initiatives:

1. Data is stored in brittle, aging, and vulnerable legacy systems and applications spread across agency silos.

For many agencies, legacy systems litter the IT landscape. Often, these store infrequently-used data and may only be accessible by one or two subject matter experts on a long out-of-use legacy application. This problem may also be compounded by the anticipated surge in near-term public sector retirements. In some instances, these legacy systems are maintained only as data repositories, raising further issues of storage and maintenance costs, and, more seriously, the risk of exposure for data at rest.

2. Data is hiding in plain sight, locked in digital and paper documents or unmanaged emails.

Open Data and Big Data analytics depend on digital data. Yet most analytics is focused on structured information held in systems. Meanwhile, unstructured information that could provide a more complete picture for analyses and decisions remains in email

and digital documents and more in paper files, which must be scanned and tagged with metadata added to make them searchable. Without those efforts, the majority of agency data—that 80% that’s unstructured--remains locked, unavailable to constituents but also unable to be of use to inform critical government decisions and fuel mission activities.

As this information multiplies, auto-classification—that is, automati-cally categorizing data and documents by type and content using technology—is essential to ensure quick, accurate retrieval. For data volumes on this scale, manually characterizing each document’s information is simply not possible. Manual classification also tests out as typically less accurate—averaging 65% manual classification accuracy to 94% accuracy for auto-classification in controlled trials. Moreover, emails are becoming a critical source of the historical record, especially in litigation, where withholding emails pertinent to pre-trial discovery can be fatal. CIO’s, CISO’s, and government leaders also need tools that will locate PII and other sensitive data automatically to protect it and prevent its inadvertent release.

3. Government data volumes are exploding.

All this government data is growing exponentially, with 90% origi-nated in the past two years alone.2 By 2016, annual government email volume is projected to grow to 143 billion emails annually. By 2020, government content worldwide is projected to be 50 times greater than it is today. When you consider that 48% of all data is stored in unmanaged fileshares,3 that data, along with those residing in out-of-use applications, is highly vulnerable, even when it is behind the firewall.

OpenText has the answer to your data dilemma – Digital Information ReadinessYou don’t have to solve this problem in a day, or even a year, but you MUST start now to harness this information explosion. Discover what you have and where your information resides. This initial step toward governance will enable you to develop an informed Enterprise Information Strategy for your agency to move confidently into Digital Government. The OpenText Digital Infor-mation Readiness Solution for the Public Sector is designed to simplify that first step.

80% of government data is unstructured1

CIO’s are finally recognizing the need for data management NOW, despite tightening budgets

Before you open up data, make sure it’s ready for release.

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P U B L I C S E C T O R I N S I G H T SMODERNIZING GOVERNMENT FOR A DIGITAL WORLD

The right choice for public agencies

OpenText understands the extraordinary amounts of scrutiny faced by governments at all levels. More than ever before, agencies must be vigilant guardians of public data and taxpayer dollars. For more than twenty years, we have partnered with public-sector agencies in more than 75 countries to safely manage data and use it to improve performance. Whether agencies move to private, public, or hybrid clouds or maintain their data onsite, OpenText is the proven global EIM leader for the public sector.

Digital Government is coming. The time to prepare is now.

Is your agency ready for 2020? Read our report, Agenda2020 and find out

Digital Information Readiness gives public agencies a window into data that exists across organization stovepipes—data that gives context to decisions, helps you determine what is ready to release, and minimize your agency’s risk. OpenText brings the full power of our industry-leading OpenText Discovery Suite and OpenText InfoFusion capabilities to offer unprecedented access to view your data. It empowers organizations to make responsible decisions on the next steps, whether to act on the data, make it publicly avail-able, or use it to improve agency agility and mission performance, all while lowering the costs associated with maintaining your information landscape.

A single source of truth

Move into Digital Government with ease using the Digital Information Readiness views of your data heatmaps to display your complex information in an intelligible way. This powerful data-analysis capa-bility visualizes your data in a map format using size and color of cells to represent your data. On a heat map, you can sort out complex data arrays that meet your mission needs and identify outliers. This capability enables you to identify sensitive data to protect it from release, determine what should be retained, disposed of, migrated, or released with certainty.

Digital Information Readiness offers ease of integration with servers and applications across your IT landscape. It is easy for even end-users to use with flexible configurations and provides the full capability to drill down and through the heatmap to the underlying data.

To simplify making the right decisions regarding agency data with your internal stakeholders, our solution includes the option of a collaboration platform for your Enterprise Information Management (EIM) team. This enables you to bring subject matter, content, system, and legal experts together from across your organization to collaborate on bringing sense to your data and minimizing its risks going forward.

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NOW is the time to define an Enterprise Information Strategy

Heat maps identify what data lies where

About the author

Patricia Burke is OpenText’s global Public Sector Strategist. She’s spent more than 25 years transforming US and foreign agencies and corporations through technology.

1 AIIM. (2010). How Do You Leverage Your Unstructured Content? Retrieved from http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Research/White-Papers/Data-is-Unstructured-Information

2 IBM. (2014). What is Big Data? Retrieved from http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html3 Osterman Research, Inc. (2012). File Archiving: The Next Big Thing or Just Big? Whitepaper. Retried from: http://www.

ostermanresearch.com/whitepapers/orwp_0176.pdf