Insider's Guide to Using Information in Government

Summary of Key Points

Strategy

Understand the underlying business need and ask "Why are we doing this?"
Negotiate the environment and determine who has stake in this and why.
Account for existing infrastructure, practices, history, and culture. This is working in the real world.
Look ahead to keep one eye on the future.
Devise a clear approach and plan then share it with stakeholders.

Information policies guide decisions about how, why, when, and by whom information is used.
Information policy principles rest on fundamental democratic principles.
Stewardship encourages policies that regard government information as a public good.
Usefulness principle promotes policies that encourage the innovative use of government information to improve the quality and lower the cost of government services.
Policies should ensure good quality and ready availability of data for action.

Data issues are the biggest challenges to government agencies transitioning from legacy, stovepipe systems to integrated systems.
Data quality goes beyond 'clean data' to evaluation of data for 'fitness for use'.
Data that is not used cannot be correct for very long.
Laws of data quality apply equally to data and meta data.
Lack of data standards is a significant barrier to information use.
Meta data is critical when dealing with data quality and data standards.
Understanding the complex program environments within which the data is used is as important as the quality of the data.

Managing relationships with team members, project sponsors, and external stakeholders are hidden costs that must be addressed.
The greater the different between old and new work processes, the higher the cost.
Identify the gap between the technologies you have and the technologies you want. Costs will increase with the size of the gap.
Separating independent tasks into parallel efforts helps control costs.
Integration is costly. Know what you need to integrate and how much.
Identify the differences among your data resources. The greater the differences the more it will cost to integrate them.

Organizations, like people, are information users.
Skilled information users define problems, select information, analyze, interpret, and present results.
Every project involves five kinds of skills: analytical, information management, technical, communication and presentation, and project management.
There are a number of ways to acquire necessary skills.

Technology choices affect an organization's current and future capabilities.
Technologies become imbedded in every aspect of the organization including processes, user practices, and infrastructure.
Technology can change the way government does business.
Technology can improve customer service and streamline administration.
Technology can help government solve complex problems.