What’s stopping local councils from addressing resident frustrations?
There’s no shortage of data in local authorities – the problem is that those vast volumes of data can’t always be accessed when and where they’re needed. Data is pocketed in different departments, on different systems, in different formats, making it impossible for information to flow easily between one council team and another. In some cases, authorities are still struggling to digitise paper records and advance beyond manual data reporting, making it harder to centralise complete, accurate records.
If one citizen's data points are scattered across the organisation – parking registrations here, environmental health complaints there – each department will see a fragment of the citizen they are dealing with, but none will have a full view of the person behind the data.
If local authorities want to make the ‘golden record’ a reality, they need to break down the barriers
between these siloes and create a centralised source of data that every department can access.