How governments can use data to provide proactive citizen services

How does Amazon know what else a shopper might want to buy? By leveraging its data. Amazon doesn’t just collect data on each customer and their purchases. It also uses this data to tempt customers with new, related sales offers.

Government agencies would do well to similarly offer personalized services in a proactive way. At first, you might worry that governments would be able to raise taxes when combining data sets across agencies. But what if instead, the government tells a citizen they’re entitled to a higher school grant? Or what if an agency comes up with a proactive calculation to actually lower your taxes? Science fiction? Not if government agencies become data-driven in a transparent way.

Some leading public-sector agencies are doing this already. They use their data to offer citizens new services in ways that are both proactive and personalized. Also, they often make these services available on a self-service basis.

New tech journey

To do this, public-sector agencies are augmenting their traditional data warehouses and business-intelligence systems with new technologies. These include machine learning, automatic grant processing, semi-automatic decision processing, and fraud analysis based on combining data sets in a data lake.

Adopting these technologies is a journey. You can’t just buy AI off the shelf and plug it in overnight. It takes new skills, new practices, even new ways of working together. But agencies willing to make this journey and change their operating model find that the payoff can be enormous.

Consider the Flemish government’s Department of Education. It mines data to offer school grants to eligible parents in a proactive way. The department’s data already includes information about Flemish public-school students and their families. By combining this data in new ways, the department can detect whether a family is eligible for a subsidy or school grant. When an opportunity is detected, the agency sends the family a letter that essentially says, “Based on our data, you’re eligible for a school grant of X euros a month. If you’re interested, please apply here…”

This kind of offering is both proactive and personal. In the past, Flemish families had to do the research on their own. For many, figuring out whether they were eligible for a school grant was complicated, time-consuming and potentially frustrating, especially for those who determined that their children were not eligible. Now, in essence, the government does that research for them. Plus, it communicates only with those families who are indeed eligible.

Protecting privacy

But what about citizen privacy? That’s important, too. Flemish citizens can now audit their government’s files to see what data an agency holds on them, how it got that data, and how it uses the data. This kind of transparency and control is essential to becoming data-driven.

Governments can protect citizen privacy even further by establishing independent privacy commissions. That’s the case in Flanders. There, whenever two or more government agencies want to share data, they must first obtain permission from an independent privacy commission. This commission can also specify which data fields may be exchanged. For example, the privacy commission might allow a child’s age to be exchanged, but not the child’s name or birthday. It’s worth noting that this provides far more robust protection of citizens’ privacy than consumers will typically find in the private sector.

There’s gold in public-sector databases. Governments that mine this data can offer proactive, personalized services while also protecting their citizens’ privacy.

About the author

Yves Vanderbeken is DXC Technology’s chief technologist in Belgium. He focuses on delivering innovative approaches to digital services transformation, deriving public and business value from data, and helping governments realize benefits from consolidated platforms and shared services in their drive toward Everything as a Service.