Lamb dressed as mutton
The title of the CLG’s paper “Effective Partnership Data Management” (EPDM) is not exactly welcoming and guarantees a small readership even in local government. This is a real shame because it’s an interesting report and addresses an important issue.
If we are honest the detail of performance management in the public sector is a nerd’s paradise. The language used is often inaccessible. This is a problem because it is a mainstream issue. By and large I found the EPDM report easy to read (although I struggle with terms like disaggregate data) but I’m not convinced that others are looking at it even in the CLG. Perhaps I need to look harder but I haven’t seen any read across, either way, from this work to the Total Place initiative although the synergy seems obvious.
Sentiment around performance management in local government feels delicately poised. On the one hand there is a general recognition that performance management has improved and the capacity to monitor inputs and outputs has had a major impact on service performance. There is also the recognition that devolution, the pursuit of outcomes and the leadership role of local government in a locality generates the requirement for a new performance management approach. Sustainable Community Strategies (SCS) and Local Area Agreements (LAAs) are the embodiment of this. We are only at the beginning of a long journey however and stamina will be tested when the Audit Commission starts to evaluate performance through the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA). Sentiment about the old performance system also provides a difficult legacy for the new system. The general desire to reduce targets easily translates into getting rid of targets and measurement altogether.
Getting it right will be crucial but getting it right is not easy. In public sector we constantly beat ourselves up with private sector comparisons which at best are only partially valid. Tesco is clearly a brilliantly managed business (other brilliantly managed super markets are available) but their performance management challenge is relatively simple in comparison with the leadership of a place. Tesco can generate detailed information about every element of its business, from suppliers to stores, to customers. Despite its size this information enables it sell different product lines to different populations and more recently to manage of portfolio of different types of stores (from small “convenience” to superstore). Crucially leaders at Tesco can use this information to direct and innovate in a fairly straight forward way and methods of reporting progress to their key stakeholder (shareholders) are tightly defined.
Hardly any of the above applies to the public sector, particularly when we view the public sector as a group of organizations delivering “outcomes” to a local population. Even within councils we don’t have the equivalent process derived data which flows from each element of the Tesco “fulfillment” process. The disparate nature of the services provided and the range of “customers” these services are delivered to (and the different types of relationship involved) make a unified view of fulfillment impractical if not impossible. While the electorate is the ultimate stakeholder for a council leader the reality is that there are a whole host of other stakeholders (government in particular) who need to be convinced that progress is being made.
Devolution and deregulation doesn’t remove the need for performance management it just changes the requirement. The EPDM report breaks the requirement down into four categories:
Strategic management: • How could sharing of detailed disaggregate (unique citizen) data be used to support evidence based, citizen centred planning of service delivery?
Performance management: • What solutions need to be put in place to streamline the flow of aggregate data across central, regional and local government agencies? How could disaggregate data be used to reduce the performance reporting burden on local government agencies? What approaches should be used to drive more effective knowledge sharing and benchmarking across LSPs and partners?
Operational delivery: • How could disaggregate data and intelligence be used to improve front line delivery of services both in terms of improved service for customers and increased operational efficiencies?
Citizen engagement: • How could the solutions being proposed to improve service delivery more directly support the citizen empowerment agenda? How could these solutions improve the flow of timely information to citizens?
These requirements are challenging but have to be addressed – to some degree – if we are going to realise the ambition of devolution. Responding to them is complex and even contentious (for instance around re-use of personal data) but the report does suggest a way forward. The fact that the report doesn’t seem joined up with other initiatives (Total Place) suggests an urgent need to raise its profile and make sure that its not just the performance management enthusiasts who get involved
I am the Director of Services at the 
Given the project’s ramifications, it’s a pity the EPDM report was published very quietly on the CLG website.
What the project appears to propose is a centralised record for every member of the public known as the ‘Integrated Citizen Record’, which will shared by LSP partners and track citizens every interaction with government, similar to the National Identity Register.
One of the explicit purposes of EPDM is to enable fishing expeditions for benefit fraud, similar to the National Fraud Initiative, and to provide automatic updates on change of circumstances, apparently duplicating the Tell Us Once system currently in development. Having built up such a detailed picture of the citizen, the EPDM project proposes it will be used to predict citizen needs and enable ‘intervention campaigns’.
The amount of data being amassed by this project is staggering, yet reading the report the legal basis of this work is entirely unclear.
Nor is much detail provided about exactly how these extensive - and potentially very lucrative - pools of details personal data are proposed to be protected, or exactly who (and how many people) will have access to this data.
The lack of clear links, as you point out, to other initiatives such as Total Place is worrying and does not bode well for this project at all.
A bit surprised that this post has not attracted more comments, given the importance of the topic. Sorry for arriving late at the scene, but my head has been immersed in Knowledge Hub detail and only now just surfacing for air. Anyway, better late than never. Even if CLG are not joining the dots between EPDM and Total Place, I’m making an attempt at doing so through the ‘data’ workstream element of the Knowledge Hub.
Meetings with CLG project/programme leads are in hand, and I’ll map out the overlaps between IDeA performance management initiatives, linked data, opendata, and hyperlocal initiatives and the Knowledge Hub. I can see the need for once more getting immersed in the detail. Another gulp of air needed before I start!
Thanks Steve, activity on the EDPM project does seems to have terribly quiet.
I just spotted today this update from the project from September at
http://www.esd.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10202
“In considering how to take this work forward we have always believed strongly that the work needs to be developed and owned by the local government sector, and everyone who has been engaged in this work has also emphasised how critical this will be if the work is to be successful. With this in mind we are working closely with the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) to develop the envisaged work programme and to transfer management and responsibility for that programme to the IDeA.”
Not sure how IDeA is more local than CLG, but there you go.