Overview of this Unit

The purpose of Unit 5 is to help statistically literate students to identify opportunities to use data to solve real world government problems, and to anticipate the practical challenges they will face when doing so. It does not involve teaching granular data science skills which are beyond the minimum digital era competencies that apply to all public service leaders. We provide links to full depth courses on those skills, below.

This material, developed by 'Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age', has been prepared to help university faculty to add digital era skills to the teaching of Masters in Public Policy and Masters in Public Administration programs. All these materials are based on our eight Digital Era Competencies - this unit corresponds mostly closely to Competency 7.

This unit is one of eight units that make up a full semester course. The units have also been designed to be used by educators independently, without students taking the rest of the course. This unit can be taught in either one or two classes.

This Unit's Learning Outcomes

Learning Outcome 1

By the end of Unit 5 students will be able to identify common archetypal purposes for which governments make use of data. For example:

As a tool to inform policy design and to set strategies
To monitor compliance with laws and programmes
To understand citizen needs and behaviours
To monitor performance
To identify and prevent new problems
To directly power a public service (e.g biometric passport gates)
To enable policy and programme evaluation
To meet the needs of parties outside of government (for more see Unit 7)

Learning Outcome 2

By the end of Unit 5 students will be able to explain the key challenges that affect government's ability to use data successfully. This includes:

Key decision-makers sometimes lack familiarity with how data is stored, processed and used in the digital era.
Key decision-makers often lack knowledge of how to integrate data technologies into their administrative processes
Governments hire or contract the wrong skills to process and use data, including both inappropriate technical skills, and individuals with a lack of understanding of government operations and public policy challenges.
Government data is often stored in silos, and in non-standardised ways, making its use for many purposes difficult or impossible.
Attempts to join up or share data are stymied by legal or cultural factors - including both legitimate safeguards and unjustified hoarding.
Policies and services are sometimes commissioned on the erroneous belief that data quality and availability is better than it actually is.
The volumes of actively and passively generated data are rapidly expanding and overwhelming governments' ability to process this data.
A failure to understand how data driven decision-making will interact with the messy world of people and politics.