Authoritative Citizen Information

DWP had plenty of data about its citizens. What it didn't have was one version of it. People had multiple names and multiple addresses, collected at different times in conflicting ways. It was often quicker for a team to ask the citizen again than to find what the department already knew. Every service paid for that, and so did the citizen.

The Director of DWP Digital commissioned a project to reshape how data is collected, stored and shared. My job was to find out what "authoritative" actually means. I spoke to citizens, product teams, architects, operations staff and senior leadership.

The answer isn't simple, and that's the finding. There's no such thing as universally authoritative data. Authority is in the eye of the user. A person can have several valid addresses, each used for a different reason. The value isn't in picking one winner. It's in showing how and why data was collected, and letting people see and manage it themselves.

That shaped a new data architecture pattern and metadata standards, designed to take API integration from nine months to two weeks. The programme was approved to go ahead, then paused when Covid hit. It may yet move forward.

I was brought in for a data problem. The answer was a question about people, which is usually the case.