DATA & ANALYTICS

Embedding data governance and management to improve operational effectiveness.

Background

The Home Office plays a fundamental role in the security and economic prosperity of the UK, covering immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism and police.

They faced a serious challenge in assessing and managing the quality of data in a system used to secure the UK border. We defined their strategy and led the definition of a data quality and governance framework to enable the Home Office to measure the quality of the data and take action to improve it. Working directly with Home Office staff and third-party, commercial organisations to achieve the changes required to improve data quality.

Requirements

To enable the project to extend the border the Home Office needed to significantly improve the quality of data in a critical system used to secure the UK border. This also required improvements in data processing times, completeness and accuracy for a system processing over 1 million pieces of data a day in the UK and internationally.

Viable Data actions

We supported the Home Office to develop their first automated data quality assessment platform and enabled significant improvements in key data quality metrics within the first few months. We continued to advise the Home Office to improve and evolve their data quality management capability, through the introduction of multiple products; each targeted at a specific strategic objective and user group.

• Assessed the project’s requirements and carried out audits, mapping connections and existing data models
• Championed the introduction of agile ways of working and utilised AI to automate testing of deployments
• Instilled coding standards, design patterns and Test-Driven Development enabling delivery of consistent and sustainable trusted code
• Used GDPR, data protection legislation and NCSC security standards to ensure that solutions were ‘secure by design’
• Defined the in-house Data Quality team roles, followed by training in the new system

Outputs and results

The Home Office made huge improvements to the quality of their data and was recognised by the World Customs Organisation in 2017 for the advances that they have made in “Data Analysis for Effective Border Management” and they are now seen as a world leader in this area.