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Data Superconductor Description

The public sector, much like the private sector, is heavily investing in analytics at federal (‘Teradata, IBM get bulk of Home Affairs’ IT budget windfall – Hardware – Storage – iTnews’ 2018) and state level (A Data Reform Strategy for the Victorian Public Service 2018). Whether the analytics is intended for operational effectiveness or to inform policy and service design, the concept of ‘social license’ is crucial.

Social license

In government circles, the term ‘social license’ has been co-opted from the broader business term ‘social license to operate’ – where the ability to operate depends on support from the community. The recent scandal around My Health Record data (Pash 2018) highlights potential for damage to social license for government data projects. Consequently, many jurisdictions re-examined their requirements for how data analytics handles sensitive or private information. This was an area of critical discussion at the a large conference for senior public sector officials earlier this year (‘FST Government Victoria 2018 FST Media’ 2018).

Analytics requirement

The requirements sound deceptively simple:

  • We want to analyse all our data securely and cheaply
  • We want full optionality in the tools we use for analytics
  • We want to link data from different departments for the same person – even if those systems use different identifiers for that person
  • We want effective governance and security with
    1. privacy by design and;
    2. continuity of social licenseOpportunity

There is an opportunity to provide secure analytical services

  • at low cost on secure public cloud platforms
  • that is modular and provides optionality for end users
  • provides built in governance and controls
  • scales well
  • with rich functionality for different users (business analysts to data scientists)

Our Offer and Business Model

Engagement model

  • Open core products providing a modular analytics capability
    * A visual analytics dashboard aimed at answering the top enduring policy questions – for policy officers and executives that uses confidentialised data
    * A scalable and secure analytics environment to answer detailed emerging policy or research questions
    * Mechanisms to link disparate data around themes of person, place and economy, with adjustable rules and heuristics that can be tuned depending on use cases
    * An open metadata experience to help people understand the context of the data and its meaning
    • All products governed with the ‘5 Safes Framework’ (Desai et al. 2016)
    • Free software and patterns around which we will:
      • Develop a community, which is;
      • Managed by Data JPS
    • Pay for early access
      • Features available in the free software will lag behind that available for early access clients (currently 6 months)
      • All features will be eventually available free to the community
    • Pay for support
    • Pay for priority features

Build model

  • Co-development with VicGov agencies
  • Seek funding and support from CivVic LabsBlog and Strategy Links

The three other pieces of the assignment are available at:

  1. Blog
  2. Strategy
  3. Governance

References

A Data Reform Strategy for the Victorian Public Service 2018, accessed August 19, 2018, from <www.dpc.vic.gov.au>.

‘ASD Certified Cloud Services – Information Security Registered Assessors Program’ 2018, accessed November 11, 2018, from https://acsc.gov.au/infosec/irap/certified_clouds.htm.

‘FST Government Victoria 2018 FST Media’ 2018, FST Media, accessed November 11, 2018, from https://fst.net.au/conferences/fst-government-victoria-2018.

Desai, T, Ritchie, F, Welpton, R, Desai, T, Ritchie, F & Welpton, R 2016, ‘Five Safes: Designing data access for research’, accessed August 18, 2018, from http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/28124/.

Pash, C 2018, ‘REPORT: The director responsible for privacy at My Health Record has resigned Business Insider’, Business Insider, accessed November 11, 2018, from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/director-responsible-for-privacy-at-my-health-record-has-resigned-2018-11.

Sharwood, S 2018, ‘Vic Health IT scores $80m budget bump thanks to agile wins – Strategy – Training & Development – iTnews’, accessed November 11, 2018, from https://www.itnews.com.au/news/vic-health-it-scores-80m-budget-bump-thanks-to-agile-wins-514764.

‘Teradata, IBM get bulk of Home Affairs’ IT budget windfall – Hardware – Storage – iTnews’ 2018, accessed November 11, 2018, from https://www.itnews.com.au/news/teradata-ibm-get-bulk-of-home-affairs-it-budget-windfall-491704.

Note that Data SuperConductor and all the related content for it is not real – including this page. It’s just a hypothetical university project.