#sharetosave…some thoughts by Graham Hyde

The inaugural Local Public Services SIG event took place at Local Government House in Smith Square, London on Tuesday 29th June 2010. The event was entitled #sharetosave, an idea that I totally support. The ability to do something once and to share that with others adds significant weight to the inevitable business case. The Public Sector is full of duplication. There are hundreds of Health related organisations, hundreds of local authorities, many many central government departments and even more arms length bodies, quangoes and authorities, all wanting to make the most of place. So lets make it easy and help them.

In its response to the Ordnance Survey consultation, Government decided to make certain datasets freely available. On 1st April 2010, this became OS OpenDataTM. Government also decided that it should move to a centrally funded Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA). By 1st April 2011, this will be in place. PSMA will bring together the core datasets currently provided by three separate Mapping Agreements, the Pan Government Agreement (PGA), the Mapping Services Agreement (MSA) and the NHS Digital Mapping Agreement (DMA). So here we see three into one. Cost saving and efficiencies ahoy!

There is also the possibility of a National Address Register too. This is surely a massive boost for the #sharetosave mantra and long overdue. Getting the intellectual property rights sorted out in this country over Addressing should be up there at number one on the #sharetosave agenda. Personally, I would get all parties together in a room and knock their heads together but I’m not sure that approach would work. As a real world example of this madness, the Office for National Statistics has spent a rumoured £12million on an address list to deliver its census forms next year. Every time I hear this mentioned I get angry and frustrated that this was allowed to happen. I find the sum of money quoted both vast and unnecessary to the point of insanity. I realise there are often very good reasons for everything but I have never understood the need for 3 different databases which surely could have been one. A missed opportunity? I’m not the only one either: “We welcome the creation of a national address register for the census, but find it barely credible that this valuable resource is not to be maintained after 2011. We recommend that the Government deal with the intellectual property issues which inhibit maintenance of the register as a matter of urgency.” The UK Parliament London Regional Committee: London’s population and the 2011 Census. I am convinced that Addressing is being dealt with.

So that’s data sorted out then. Or is it? It might be free, but is it useable?

What do we as the Public Sector do with all this data? Download it to our C drives and leave it there? Will we get to the situation where many people within an organisation download data to their C drives and leave it there or download the data and come back to it in a year’s time, carry out some analysis, deliver a service and then find the raw data was out of date? We’ve been here before haven’t we?

Service is important for PSMA members. Should we ask each organisation take a series of DVDs, CDs or online downloads, load the data into their spatial databases and serve it out to all of their mapping implementations? #sharetosave? Let’s leave data provision to the experts. Web map services, web feature services and online tile rendering services. Let’s get someone else to manage data. Economies of scale dictate that doing something on a national level (once) rather than a local level (many) will mean an overall saving. Does each Local Authority actually need its own copy of MasterMap Topography layer? Having someone else manage your data will mean it is always there, always be up-to-date and there is no costly internal IT infrastructure to maintain and support. Does the Public Sector trust The Cloud enough?

Here’s an idea. Lets actually do what as GIS Professionals we went to University for and we enjoy and love. Lets allow our organisations to reap the benefit of free data together with the benefits of hosted data services. We can finally get our hands dirty and do some spatial analysis.

What I took away from the AGI LPS SIG event was that there are many organisations and people doing lots of good geo-tastic things in many different ways. Where is the #sharetosave here? The market has a hand in this. With the money to be made from reselling Ordnance Survey data now gone, the market must focus on services and solutions. This is all well and good but with so many companies out there touting for business there will be a mixture of solutions emerging. There will not be a standard #sharetosave platform, solution or deliverable. Is this what #sharetosave is aiming? Not in my mind. I don’t profess to understand the intricacies of economics but to me this is like having multiple address databases. Could we ever get to one common solution, one common architecture, one common deliverable?

It is certainly true that these are very interesting times in the Public Sector. Reduced budgets, cuts, doing more with less are all fantastic opportunities for us to show the power of GI and how place should be embedded into Public Sector thinking to deliver real benefits.

republished with thanks