Data governance provides evidence-based decision-making that improves the quality of service delivery
Once known as “Vehicle City”, the leading automobile manufacturing anchor in the US Midwest from the early 20th century onwards, Flint in Michigan, housed big names such as General Motors, Buick and Chevrolet, becoming a beacon of prosperity and embodying the American dream that dominated Fifties and Sixties contemporary culture.
But a series of events befell this city from the Seventies, triggered by GM downsizing during the ensuing decades into the 21st century. The economic conditions were worsened by the 2008 global financial crisis, leading to more job losses and financial distress, compounded by high crime rates which gained momentum from the mid-2000s.
Shortly thereafter, Flint became consumed with a public health crisis in April 2014, when its drinking water was contaminated with lead and possibly bacteria. The city changed its water source, but failed to apply corrosion inhibitors, which resulted in lead from the aging pipes being absorbed into the water supply. This resulted in 6,000 to 14,000 children being exposed to high levels of lead.
Children are particularly at risk from the long-term effects of lead poisoning and can experience a reduction in intellectual functioning and IQ, increased mental and physical health problems and higher chances of Alzheimer’s disease.
A state of emergency was declared in early 2016. Various interventions were offered by experts in the wake of the disaster of what ought to have been done — specifically, removing the lead distribution pipes and replacing them with plastic, as well as expanding water testing beyond the neighbourhoods that had pipes with either low lead levels or no lead pipes at all.
The story of Flint is one of many that underscores the urgency for governments at all levels (and the private sector) to adopt a data governance strategy, a management framework that outlines how data should be handled, processed, protected and maintained in an organisation.
The world is in a data-driven age. To execute effectively at scale, everything should be digitised and extracted for analytical purposes. Without data, decisions are simply guesses.
In the simplest ways, a data governance regime can produce a marked difference in service delivery quality and outcomes. Think of how a digital telemetry system enables a municipality to monitor the levels of treated water in their reservoirs, in real time from a central database, accessible from any internet-connected device. Faster decisions can be made about whether to enforce water restrictions, or close off certain valves to allow more water into a reservoir that has depleted faster than others, all geared towards the objective of ensuring taps never run dry.
Better and more responsive service delivery is why the City of Cape Town launched a data strategy in September last year. Starting out as an internal data strategy for the municipality in 2018, lessons were learnt in the intervening years, arming the city’s officials and leaders to scale up the strategy to create a comprehensive data culture.
Through this strategy, data is collected from different municipal services, which enables the city to analyse the value chain of their service delivery, identify weaknesses far more punctually and implement solutions more rapidly.
This strategy alone will equip the city to expand predictive maintenance on key infrastructure over time, such as proactive work on mini electricity substations. Data collection and analysis will provide officials with a dashboard of what key infrastructure is due for maintenance, so that different projects can be rolled out in various stages of priority. The result is a more efficient use of municipal resources and fewer failures of mini substations, decreasing the number of electricity outages for residents.
Having this data strategy can also provide officials with the information they need to pick up on any anomalies. The city experiences far fewer service delivery requests from informal settlements, compared with the suburbs, which does not add up, considering informal settlements are denser than suburbs.
From this information, the city has rolled out a pilot project in targeted informal settlements to encourage more reporting of service delivery needs. The data strategy has empowered officials to analyse the various categories of requests to streamline tasks with the relevant city departments and to formulate plans to address any overarching problems.
These plans can often inform high-level strategic documents such as the city’s Integrated Development Plan.
A strategy like this propels service delivery into a digital age and has strengthened transparency with the public. Residents and stakeholders now enjoy access to the city’s Open Data Portal, stocked with maps of basic services; demographics; data on housing, transportation and energy, as well as ongoing water quality sampling for inland and coastal bodies, enabling them to make their own decisions in their everyday lives.
Think how a data governance framework adopted by the city of Flint could have tracked the process to replace all lead pipes and expand regular and frequent testing of drinking water. A whole generation of residents would not have been scarred for life, while trust between citizens and its government would not have been irrevocably eroded.
When data is used effectively, and is accessible to an organisation, it has the potential to reshape decision-making and transform outcomes.
Ferdinand Steenkamp is the co-founder of data company Tregter.