*UKHotViewsExtra* Civil Service Data Challenge: Winner revealed

Seeing civil servants get excited about solving challenges within their own organisations is something to be celebrated.

That’s exactly what the Civil Service Data Challenge encourages, as civil servants come together to determine how Government can make better use of data. We have written about the competition on several occasions before. The Challenge is a collaboration between the Cabinet Office, Office for National Statistics, NTT DATA, and the Global Government Forum.

This is the third iteration of the Civil Service Data Challenge and, since it started, the judges have seen a huge variety of challenges that have spurred the entrants to submit everything from simple, yet powerful, ideas, though to those that have been complex and ground-breaking. Past successes in the competition have gone onto be delivered.

And this week was the 2024 final, which I was fortunate to attend. It involved the finalists pitching to a judging panel consisting of seven digital and data leaders: Aydin Sheibani, Chief Data Officer, HMRC; Fiona James, Chief Data Officer & Director of Data, Growth & Operations, ONS; John Quinn, CIO, NHS England; Gina Gill, Chief Strategy Officer, Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO); Simon Bourne, Chief Digital, Data, and Technology Officer, Home Office; Sue Bateman, Chief Data Officer, DEFRA; and Vicki Chauhan, Head of Public Sector, NTT DATA UK&I.

Of the eight ideas long listed – see Civil Service Data Challenge 2024: Eight ideas longlisted | TechMarketView – four made it through to battle it out for the prize money of £50,000, as well as additional development support from key sponsors, NTT DATA, to allow them to take their ideas to development and delivery.

You can watch the highlights video of the event here to get a real sense of the energy in the room. The competition generated huge excitement amongst those in the front line of government services who had come together to resolve the frontline issues they deal with in their everyday jobs. Kudos to the finalists man of whom have had limited – or no – experience of presenting in such an environment but used the competition – and the support of NTT DATA - to develop a range of new skills.

The four ideas, which all look to improve the use of data across the UK public sector, focused on: using a Geospatial Planning tool to support home visits by NHS staff (RouteCare); unlocking unstructured prison data to optimise prison space management (Project Constellation); summarising Government policy for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) caseworkers to allow them to more effectively and efficiently deal with case enquiries (PoSum); and reducing the latency for data sharing between the NHS and DWP to reduce the burden on bereaved citizens, the supplication of workloads across the civil service, and the overpayment of benefits (GENIE – Government Early Notification of Incidents and Events).

And the winner was… Project Constellation!

TechMarketView subcribers can learn more about the winnning concept and the likely benefits to the UK public sector and the public purse, as well as some additional mullings around the need for Government to become better at the sharing of learnings and best practice in UKHotViewsExtra - Civil Service Data Challenge: Winner revealed. 

If you are not yet a subscriber - or are unsure if your organisation has a corporate subscription - please ping an email over to Belinda who will be happy to put things right. 

Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '18:26' - Tagged: learning   data   public+sector