How do I stand up an enterprise data and analytics platform during a pandemic?
This question may sound ridiculous at first, but many state and local governments are realizing the necessity for data-driven decision-making as a result of COVID-19. We’ve seen governors and multiple health officials pointing to data as justification for closing schools, shuttering restaurants, delaying primaries and extending tax filing. This crisis is impacting many functions of governments across the enterprise.
So, what do you do? If you’re an executive at a state or local government and you must continue making critical decisions in this new environment, how do you get access to and leverage the key data you need to inform crucial decisions.
The potential good news is that circumstance is often the mother of invention. COVID-19 may be the burning platform that leapfrogs analytic capabilities in governments combined with technology advancements in cloud, distributed data storage, analytics and visualization capabilities, as well as data science and an increase in practitioners. This combination can drive the need to get “something done” today.
If you decide to move forward, three considerations are key before you begin to consider data and technology:
- Leadership
- Privacy and security
- Fit for purpose
Leadership — This is the most valuable asset for standing up a data platform in a pandemic. In states and cities with aggressive and robust data platforms, this has been driven by the governor or mayor. The executive in charge must provide the vision to get it done and the leadership to overcome what will surely be challenges across people, technology, process and governance. Often overlooked, leadership is the key success factor in state and local government data platforms that are providing insights impacting decision-making. Leadership ultimately impacts all technical, legal, policy and people considerations for developing a data platform.
The top executive must make this a priority and empower the project leader to build this capacity quickly. The project leader may be the chief data officer or the chief information officer or could be outsourced to a firm. The key is that the executive empowers the project leader to move quickly and break through administrative red tape. Once the project leader is selected, that individual should align working groups across three critical areas: Agency heads/executives, Data and technical resources, Legal and policy resources.
Privacy and security — Few things can derail a data initiative like a data breach of privacy and security concerns. These data sets will be impacted by a patchwork of privacy and security laws, rules and recommendations. As stewards of these critical public data sets, privacy and security must be paramount. Organizations can leverage frameworks developed for these purposes and rely on outside entities to assist the enterprise with these critical decisions.
Fit for purpose — One of the biggest challenges to standing up a data and analytics platform so quickly will be aligning your decisions from an outcome perspective with the problem you are trying to address or the questions you are trying to answer. Additionally, each platform should leverage existing investments in data and analytics by the enterprise.
The tendency to overspend will be significant but create diminishing returns and leave value on the table. The goal should be to rapidly deploy a new analytic capability the administration can use to manage key aspects of the pandemic response: Financial, Health, Human resources, Unemployment,CARES Act traceability
Practical considerations for determining fit for purpose include:
- Existing technology for data and analytics
- Existing data projects currently underway
- Impact for data access for new working-from-home paradigm
- Governance framework: legislation, executive order, etc.
The approach should align to addressing these key questions and how to monitor spending across the enterprise related to the pandemic, rather than trying to anticipate and solve for all the future enterprise data needs of the organization. See related article, “Follow the money: how states need to prepare for the CARES Act.”
The views reflected in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other member firms of the global EY organization.
