Corporate report

UKHSA Advisory Board: UKHSA data strategy

Updated 16 November 2022

Date: 16 November 2022

Sponsor: Steven Riley

Purpose of the paper

Obtain feedback from the Advisory Board on the UK Health Security’s (UKHSA) data strategy.

Recommendation for the Advisory Board

The Advisory Board is asked to:

• endorse the overall approach to the data strategy
• note work to align with the 5 UKHSA data principles which set our standards for data handling and insight generation
• note continued engagement to provide feedback and to further align the various strategies and objectives, prior to agreement of a prose version of the data strategy
• note that the Executive Committee will consider the data strategy when making investment, policy, and service delivery decisions

Background summary

UKHSA is reliant on data to inform all its work: its guidance, its interventions and its science. We want to extract the greatest value from the data we hold to keep the nation health secure and achieve our health security objectives. A data strategy will enable UKHSA to better manage, access, analyse and act on its data and insights. It will enable better sharing of key data assets with our partners in both directions, resulting in improved operations across the agency, including those when responding to health security incidents.

There are numerous challenges in our ability to get value from data today. Data can be difficult to find or access, might be duplicated, or our systems unable to interoperate. These challenges exist because we lack a unified approach to data, analytics and insight, and while there are widely accepted principles about how best to get value from data in an organisation, many teams across the organisation don’t consistently apply them today.

The UKHSA data strategy seeks to establish – for the first time – agency-wide data principles and an approach to mature our data capabilities over time. It draws heavily on the emerging data capability maturity model, developed by the Cabinet Office’s Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO). It is anticipated this model will eventually be used to support and assess all government departments’ data capabilities. As an early adopter, UKHSA is working closely with CDDO to embed this.

We will continue to engage across UKHSA to align existing strategies, including the UKHSA corporate strategy, as well as group objectives. We are also engaging with external communities, including our partners in government, industry and academia, to build a leading data strategy for UKHSA.

The Data Capability Maturity Assessment will commence in Q4 of 2022 as a pilot, before being rolled out across the entire agency in Q1 and Q2 of 2023. This will involve working with the numerous people across the agency who have knowledge on a wide range of data topics, including having the right data systems and knowing the data we have, making decisions with data, managing and protecting our data, and taking responsibility for data. The approach used to assess will be a mix of expert contributions answering on behalf of teams, workshops with representatives across the agency, and surveys to get the view of wider staff. It is important that we also include people who do not consider themselves to be ‘data people’ to ensure the results are reflective of the whole agency. The maturity levels we will be using for data maturity are beginning (1), emerging (2), learning (3), developing (4) and mastering (5). The result will be a directorate level maturity report, outlining the level of maturity across the data capabilities as well as recommended actions to achieve improvements where needed.

Implementation of the data strategy will improve the health security outcomes set in our corporate strategy and this will be measured through the maturation of group data capabilities and data specific key performance indicators. These will be regularly reported to the Executive Committee.

The data strategy, its principles and assessment of group data maturity should be used to aid investment, service and policy delivery decisions and ultimately align groups around a unified approach to data, analytics and insight so that we can better prepare for, prevent and respond to threats to health. Numerous benefits can be realised through the data strategy, including faster operations, more efficient resource allocation, reductions in cost, fewer gaps in our data and ultimately increased confidence in our decision making.

With active support from the advisory board and groups within UKHSA, implementation of a data strategy will drive a change in UKHSA’s data culture and reap health security benefits of improved data capabilities through a unified approach to data.

Steven Riley
Director General, Data Analytics and Surveillance
November 2022