The Birth of Circular Data
Ok so there already is such a thing as circular data, but it’s very different to the concept I’m going to talk about here.
There’s already been much written and lots of money spent over the years about the Circular Economy with many countries, cities and towns across the world looking at supporting the principles of its concept. In 2015 Peterborough won the World’s Smartest City award largely due to its work in this area. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, states that if there are three key principles to consider:
Design out waste and pollution
Keep products and materials in use
Regenerate natural systems
What’s clear though is that you can apply the same principles and thinking to data and how it is used across cities, towns, businesses and public services with regards to transforming services, by replacing some key words with the word data.
The Foundation also states that “Companies need to build core competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading”. Again the word product can be easily replaced with the word data. Each of the three principles above are still valid and I will explain each of these in more detail below:
Design out waste and pollution
Many key systems are standalone and not designed to share data across services but through implementing a platform approach to both services and systems this data can be used more widely throughout the organisation (although inline with DPA principles) and siloed data that is used once and then ‘wasted’ can be designed out. This can be looked at in various guises such as single view of the customer or household through to using the data you hold in more ways than you currently do but also re-imagining services so that waste and lost effort are removed from the process and helping move to a data driven decision making model. Where possible data created by one system or service should be used to improve all the services you deliver and not ‘lost’. For pollution from a data perspective we should be thinking about removing duplicate records and bad data.
Keep data in use
As per the above point, keeping data in use is vital to achieving service improvements. I’ve worked with numerous public sector services where data is used by one team and not another; when it could clearly play a mutually beneficial role. Services need to learn and understand where ‘external’ data can be used to improve their services. By external data we mean any data not generated by the service itself. In the same way that a circular economy promotes the use of one company’s ‘waste’ to be another’s benefit; to keep materials and products in use, here we are keeping data in use. (Marmite probably being the world’s best example of this — and yes I love it). With machine learning, the machines are reliant on an ever increasing amount of good data to refine the responses and answers given. Arcus Answer which is a contact centre solution utilising the AWS Lex solution is a good example of this. All AI solutions can only ever be as good as the data they are utilising and there needs to be a constant feed.
Regenerate natural systems
We can look at this principle from a number of angles when relating it to data. For a pure natural system we could be looking at the Internet of Things (or the internet of data, as the data is the key not the ‘thing’ collecting it) which could look at everything from air and water quality (improving nature) through to a Social systems whereby transforming social care with IOT can both improve the lives of the vulnerable to look after themselves to enabling a family to be more in control of the care family members (and therefore improving the most natural of systems of family looking after family) which can now both be achieved. (https://www.youralcove.com/)
I’m passionate about data and its role in transforming services.The platform approach to Local Government services not only helps in transforming individual services but brings those services together to give that single view of the customer across multiple services. I’m also passionate about how better use of the data can improve services, a subject that I’ve presented to conferences previously, and how understanding the data you hold and being able to interrogate it in a meaningful and visual manner can show previously unseen patterns and anomalies.
It’s likely that as companies and services start to understand the concept of ‘Circular Data’ that it will will naturally spawn a circular data economy as well as playing a leading part in a helping to deliver the more conventional circular economy. The more that we all do to move towards both a circular economy and a circular data model then the better the services that can be delivered and the better economic and environmental health of our cities and countries can be achieved. With a lot of funding and effort being aimed at the Circular Economy, I think it’s time the the same levels should be applied to Circular Data taking the current Economy principles and frameworks and re-aligning them to better use of data.
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