The government needs to take learnings from the private sector on how it can better balance data sovereignty and user experience by building data products around citizen services
In 2022, IBM estimated that the average cost of a data breach had reached USD $4.35 million, a 12.7% increase on estimates from 2020. Between the risk of fines, reputational damage, and increased customer attrition, it’s unsurprising that data sovereignty, security, and privacy are at the forefront of many companies’ minds.
This is reflected in the way they build their products. Data privacy is central to the development process but must be balanced with the user experience. The focus is on building a level of ‘friendly friction’ that protects the customer without negatively impacting their experience of the product or service.
The public sector is lacking the easy user experience
However, this same approach is not embraced in the public sector, which frequently prioritises regulation over the user when building applications. This means Brits often face clunky and unnecessarily complicated digital processes for even simple tasks, like renewing a passport or accessing their medical data.
Often teams in the public sector build a digital framework on top of an existing framework for these services. They think about the service, rather than about the people using it! And this has to change.
Particularly given – unlike with the private sector – people do not have the possibility to swap to a competitor that is able to an improved experience without scrimping on security. It also means these public sector organisations miss out on opportunities to drive efficiencies in government and to roll out new products quicker.
The government needs to take learnings from the private sector on how it can better balance data sovereignty and user experience by building data products around citizen services with the end user in mind.
But how should they approach such a data product strategy?
Here are three questions to guide your process:
- What are you aiming for? Define the objectives that you want it to achieve. While this will naturally align with a particular service, that shouldn’t be the goal – it needs to be about what it should achieve for the end user. For example, making digital medical records accessible should be centred around the goal of democratising individuals’ access to their medical history.
2. Do you have everything you need? Identify whether you have the right capabilities by gaining an understanding of where the data lives, how it is integrated across systems and departments, if the data is accurate and complete, and how often it is updated.
This is essential to determine the required resources – both in terms of data, technical capabilities and budget. And is when you should start reflecting on the data privacy and security considerations that will influence how you build your data product to get the essential balance between data sovereignty and user experience.
3. What is the use case? Define a use case based around a single problem and consider what will impact the user experience. To return to our example of digitised medical records, this might be a use case for supporting patients switching from public to private services to share their full medical history with their new health provider.
Considerations for data privacy and security
In each case, start by exploring why the data product is needed, how it will be used, who will use it, how it will be consumed, and what data it should include. Again, some of the responses to these questions will introduce considerations for data privacy and security.
Approaching this from the perspective of how the end user interacts with the service for a particular use case will help support a better balance of friendly friction.
The UK is more digitally proficient than it was 50 years ago. But improved access continues to be let down by services that are designed according to policy and regulation, instead of focusing on how the end user consumes it.
Shifting towards a data product strategy, informed by the three key questions outlined above, will support the public sector in getting a greater balance between data sovereignty and offering citizen services that are fit –for use in our digital-first world.
This piece was written by Suki Dhuphar, Head of EMEA at Tamr.
