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Welcome to Data Today with Dan Klein, a podcast from Zühlke.
We're living in a world of opportunities. But to fully realise them, we have to reshape the way we innovate.
We need to stop siloing data, ring-fencing knowledge, and thinking in traditional value chains.
That's what this podcast is about. Every two weeks, we take a look at data outside the box.
Join us to learn how inspiring individuals from diverse fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data to realise their greatest opportunities.
Zühlke is a global innovation service provider. We turn big ideas into working solutions that deliver positive and sustainable value.
Dan Klein:
Hello, and welcome to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke. I'm your host, Dan Klein, and I look after everything, data and AI at Zühlke. We're living in a world of opportunities, but to fully realize them, we have to reshape the way we innovate. We need to stop soloing data, ring-fencing knowledge, and looking at traditional value chains, and that's what this podcast is about. We're taking a look at data outside the box to see how amazing individuals from disparate fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data, the challenges they are overcoming and what we can all learn from them.
If you look at any report or white paper, that's a collated and distilled set of data. If you pick up an academic journal, that's collated and distilled data. It gets collected. It gets transformed. It gets presented. So how do we make sure that we're seeing it right? How do we make sure that in every stage of the transformation our data goes through, from collection to presentation, it doesn't lose key insights, context, nuance and accuracy. It's an especially important challenge when faced with moving data between siloed systems like hard copy and digital or between different technical systems, each often controlled by entirely different stakeholders.
That's the challenge that's faced today's guest, Heather Savory has 30 years experience in the public and private sector. She currently holds non-executive director roles within the UK Parliament and Ministry of Justice and was previously the Director General for Data Capability at the Office of National Statistics. So it's fair to say she's seen a lot of information passed from one place to another in her time. So when it comes to Parliament developing data policies, is that where you're getting involved? This must make it a bit of a nightmare if you change your government every seven weeks.
Heather Savory:
The interesting thing about Parliament with data is just the fact that in my role as non-exec director of the Informational Authority for Parliament, a lot of my role has been actually persuading people who think that they're working in the library or dealing with journals or doing research that actually, they are handling and producing data. And a lot of the challenge has been trying to get the people from the information space, the traditional paper parchment, Vellum and parliamentary proceedings space, to actually realize that they are part of the information and data landscape along with all these techies who come from a completely different background and culture. And getting them to think together and work together about policies is really quite difficult.
Dan Klein:
You've used the words information and data interchangeably, but I suspect you're probably more nuanced than that. How would you describe the differences between information and data?
Heather Savory:
The difference is that information, to my mind, is derived from data. The question is, "What is your underlying data?" So if you think about, for example, a journal, a parliamentary record, the data points are the words and the information is about how the words are strung together. But what I tend to find is that you need to get people to just accept that we do tend to use these words interchangeably.
Dan Klein:
So what does Parliament per se do with information? In some senses, I'm being slightly provocative in trying to trivialize it, but it's not trivial. What does Parliament-
Heather Savory:
You're never provocative, Dan. Never, really.
Dan Klein:
Never provocative. Exactly.
Heather Savory:
If you think about what Parliament does, Parliament is there in order to hold the government to account on behalf of the public. So in some ways, Parliament's entire role is to provide information, but it doesn't really tend to see itself that way because, as with many large organizations which are quite complex and particularly the traditional ones, because Parliament is probably one of the most traditional places that we have, you get people who are specialists working in silos and they think that their job might be around parliamentary proceedings or deciding what's going to be debated in the chamber or supporting members.
And they don't really see themselves as really the fundamental source of the information upon which we run the country. So they develop legislation. They pass legislation through the house. They don't see it that way because, as with many people, they tend to focus on process. The purpose of the process is to look at, develop things and things need to be described, and that's why you have information and information requires you to look after your data.
Dan Klein:
It's interesting though. I could imagine evidence collecting for select committees being quite a challenge for Parliament in terms of store, use and consume within the parliamentary estate. How does that work?
Heather Savory:
Well, a lot of the evidence for select committees actually comes from outside parliament. It'll come from departments. It'll come from the witnesses. But you are right. There isn't yet, I'll put it that way, a consolidated approach to collecting, storing and using data across Parliament because it is a hugely siloed organization. And, in fact, there are groups of people doing small amounts of what you and I would call data science or analysis, but they do have a wealth of information and could get a lot more insight out of it. But when you go into a really traditional historic organization that doesn't see itself as having anything to do with data, it does take a while to actually get people to think in a different way. And then, of course, the challenges are, "Okay, now we know what we might want to do. How can we do it?" And then you go to your systems and you find that they're all siloed, they're antiquated, they don't talk to each other, all the stuff that you and your guys fix on a daily basis.
Dan Klein:
I think generally the terms data and information are often used interchangeably and often that people don't understand the differences fully. However, the two are linked through finding outcomes. Data can be transformed into information and information can further be embedded into stories. Parliament is one of the UK's most prevalent information providers to our democratic process, traditionally storing data on Vellum. Their reluctance to transition into a digital age has caused a disconnect between elected members and the population at large. I've known Heather for a long time and she's always challenged me to think about things in a different way, a trait that I really appreciate in her. Her ability to look at things from a totally new angle has led her down a career path that has evolved drastically. So Heather, I've got to ask this question. So how come a VSLI chip designer has landed up advising parliament? You couldn't make your story up, really. So give me some sense of the challenges that you've had over your career and why have you landed up where you've landed up, if you like?
Heather Savory:
Mainly, my career has developed the way it has because I love solving problems. In my early work for 3D Labs, we put 3D graphics onto the PC platform when it was running on mainframes by designing these chips that you're referring to. And at the time, literally we were told that it was impossible to do that, and obviously we did it. We floated the business on NASDAQ. It was hugely successful. And at that point in my career, had a great team, had a really nice lifestyle, really enjoyed the people that I worked with. But literally, I went into work one day and sat at my desk and looked around and thought, "Well, where am I going to be in 20 years time?"
Even though I really enjoyed what I was doing, I felt I was going to get into a rut. So I always just took data for granted because when you're doing graphics processes and designing chips, everything you do is about data, literally at the bits and bytes level. And so I never really thought of data as data in the way that we think about it now as a subject in its own right. I just thought, "Well, this is a waste of time." So I went and did an MBA at London Business School where I met Andrew Likierman, who was their head of government finance, which led me to apply for a job in the Treasury, and that's how I got into government. And the reason I went and did that job was I just thought, "Well, I wonder how this all works?"
Dan Klein:
Let's just talk about the ONS for a moment. Where were your biggest challenges? And obviously you've spent a lot of time with the UN as well. Where were your biggest challenges in that period?
Heather Savory:
The biggest challenge I faced when I first joined the ONS was the fact that they had attempted previously to transform to be more digital, less paper-based, and that transformation had failed. And so there was a very, very skeptical workforce of people who are brilliant people dedicated to their work, but have been doing the same thing in the same way for many years. And in fact, when I first went down to the office in Newport and I met a lady in the corridor of a certain age, probably just coming up close to her retirement, and she said to me, "Oh, it's so nice to have a female director general. We are really pleased that you've got the role, but you're never going to do anything." And that was literally the attitude at the office, that, "Somebody came in and tried to do this digital transformation in the past and it didn't work, and we are never going to change." So culture was the biggest challenge there.
Dan Klein:
Heather is a brilliant communicator on digital and data, and this has made her unique at liaising across the sectors. Her first challenge was simply strategizing how to effectively implement digital and data collections into an organization. She soon came to realize that this wouldn't be the only hurdle. Organizations would also express pushback over updating classical methods and concerns about how the new collection methods could potentially be misused. Data is a thing that can't really be predicted, but it can be challenged and modernized. Like me, Heather is fond of grand sayings to live by. You have a mantra that, "There's no digital without data, but everybody forgets about the data."
Heather Savory:
I do.
Dan Klein:
What do you mean by that?
Heather Savory:
See, when I think of digital, probably like you, Dan, I think of all aspects of digital. I think about electrons and capacitors and resistors and memory and all that sort of stuff. When you come to the web generation, people who go into digital do a fabulous job at actually the invention of agile working, looking at user needs, all that good stuff that we now take for granted. And so I spend a lot of time talking to, if you like, digital people about the fact that whatever it is they want to do, it needs to be underpinned by a good data infrastructure to be as effective as they want it to be. So your user may want some information, but that information has got to come from somewhere. If you want to put a graphic up, those graphic images have got to come from somewhere. And people tend to, because they don't come from an engineering background, think of digital as something in its own right, whereas the whole purpose of anything digital is to move data.
The problems of sharing data in most organizations, but particularly in the public sector, are vast because systems have been historically designed to do one thing, and now we're in a much more interconnected world. A good example would be something like the debates we see on TV around health and social care. So we've got NHS Digital, but is the care system or how likely is it that we can connect the care system into the pathway for hospital commissioning so that people would actually know where there are places available for them to be able to discharge people to unblock beds in the NHS? You need to start to look at things horizontally rather than vertically to understand that the journey of the user is basically going from one silo to the next next, and their data needs to go with them.
Dan Klein:
I suppose the bigger question though is that what we are talking about here is a wholesale lift of old legacy systems into a new way of sharing data between different departments, different organizations, and there's a real change required, but upgrading legacy and reinventing how data is used, it's not politically very sexy, is it? So it's not a vote winner, is it? It's a vote loser.
Heather Savory:
Ironically, the results would be a vote winner because you could tangibly provide services more effectively, more efficiently. So, for example, there is some upside from COVID here because COVID has made people realize that you can do a lot more things remotely. If I persist on the phone, get an appointment with my doctor, and then my GP will phone me, and actually that's quite efficient because you can have a 10-minute conversation with the GP. If it's a simple problem, I get a text message that says to me, "You've got an appointment with your GP tomorrow." Now I wouldn't have had that five years ago, and so people, I think, are starting to take some of this new technology information and data for granted now without actually realizing the benefit. And then people want more and more and they want it better and better, which is a good thing because it's pulling in the right direction once you demonstrate that this stuff is useful.
Dan Klein:
Let's take a specific example. Let's talk about trust. You've got a situation at the moment in the UK where Biobank, for example, has got patients to sign in their data for use in medical research, but there's a gatekeeper in amongst it all. And at the moment, only one in five GPs is pressing the button to allow that data, even though the patient said yes to allow that data to go through to the national Biobank. So there's clearly a trust issue with GPs in terms of releasing data because, on one level, GPs really want to open up the data if what they see is improved clinical outcome, improved effectiveness of the delivery of the NHS. But on the other side, they're saying, "Well, hang on a sec. We don't want somebody nefariously using any of this data for illegal reasons." So how do we break that chicken and egg?
Heather Savory:
Trust is a huge issue, and in some ways, the data protection rules that we have in the UK, although they are some of the best in the world, are also a barrier because I think people are actually worried about doing the wrong thing. I've seen a lot of this. There are a lot of places where actually those GPs have the absolute right and responsibility, in my view, to share that data. They don't want to because they're so worried about doing the wrong thing and they're worried about being held personally responsible for that data getting into the wrong hands, being used in the wrong way. Through your use of apps, et cetera, through your online banking, through using your debit or credit card, those organizations where we've had a lot of pushback from people saying, "Public sector data should not be shared," actually, the private sector is managing quite well on its own, thank you very much, without actually having access to that data because the organizations are collecting data on you all the time.
They're collecting it to give you a good customer experience. They're collecting it for good reasons. And there's a real imbalance in my view, in terms of how people view their personal data, because it's in a public data setting, because it's in a health setting, without taking that step back and thinking, "How come I'm getting this email from this commercial entity who I bought something from a little while ago asking me if I want something similar?" Or, "How come when I log into my online banking, I'm being asked a bespoke question about, 'Do I want a mortgage?' or 'Do I want a new credit card?' or 'I could get a loan'?" All of that, behind the scenes, we are being targeted by those organizations, and my bank can tell you how many times I went to Pret A Manger if it wants to.
Dan Klein:
I suppose the question for us is, as engineers, we have to be able to communicate this. So I'm really pushing to see, "How do we effectively communicate value?" So we have this challenge where they are taking the risk upfront by pressing the button and they potentially don't see the value for, I don't know, a year or two, but they may also see a negative effect of data going off somewhere else, and then the patient blames them for, "Well, you released my data, didn't you, Doc?" How do we communicate that more broadly?
Heather Savory:
There's a big challenge there because when you are talking about value, you're actually talking about public good and public value. So that's one aspect of this, that if I'm allowing my data to go into Biobank or to go to for research purposes somewhere, am I actually going to get that value myself? What I found when I was working on Open Data, particularly in the health space, was that there was a general reticence to have even anonymized data, for anonymized data to be shared openly. But then what you find is if you look at case studies where your child has a very, very unusual disease and you and your doctor and your medical team actually need as much evidence as possible, need to look at the latest research, all of a sudden people's attitudes towards sharing their data changes.
Because they can see that there is an immediate human benefit in being able to look at the anonymized data and information about what treatments are working well and not working well for people in the same situation. So being humans, we all have a level of self-interest. And when they can see that there's an immediate cause and effect that if this data is shared, something good can happen and they can personally relate to that, some of this melts away. When it's on a global scale, when it's for the good of humanity or it's for the... I think people are a little bit skeptical. And the other thing as engineers is it's about the reassurance around the governance of the data, the policies, the principles.
Dan Klein:
With the constant and rapid development of technology, we haven't always been prepared for how it may affect digital and data. Heather reinforces that there have been pitfalls and hurdles, which is where data and cybersecurity have met. We simply don't have the answers yet, but being open will help alleviate public concern. It's easy to feel overwhelmed when information and data are being shared by us and around us endlessly, and it's very easy for people to misunderstand what their data is being used for. I think the public doesn't really understand terms like GDPR and how could you expect them to? Heather is a unicorn in the sense that she knows tech and she also knows how to communicate with people that don't understand it. Heather, you and I are both engineers and engineers typically very good at technical challenges, solving problems. That's what you and I both stand for. But engineers as a cohort are typically not always the best communicators going. You're in that very unusual category of being an engineer who communicates extremely well. What advice would you give decision makers? I suppose, how would you help decision makers in communicating that?
Heather Savory:
There's a couple of things I would say. So the first thing is you have to explain things in a way that people understand them, and you have to also appreciate that not everybody has got the confidence to say, "I don't understand," particularly in a working environment. I myself, I think made one of the biggest steps in my career when I suddenly realized that I was never going to know everything and I was never going to be right all the time. And so I stopped worrying if I didn't know the answer to something. Because as you get more and more senior, you can't possibly know everything. And so I started actually trying to get people to explain things to me in a way that I could then communicate them.
So a lot of my career has been about bridging these communication divides between technical and non-technical people. In terms of my own decision making, I've been in environments where there's a huge amount of procrastination and quite often in change environments, a huge amount of pushback. And when I have had the authority later on in my career, I have quite often called a decision much earlier than people expected me to because I've always been prepared to be wrong. And when you're stuck, it's sometimes much easier to actually just call that decision and soon you work out extremely quickly whether or not you've done the right thing.
Dan Klein:
How do we communicate to the average person in the street the power and the value so that we can have a more informed debate about it?
Heather Savory:
I think you always have to ask yourself, if you are somebody like you, Dan, who wants to understand everything, you have to ask yourself whether everybody does need to understand everything. So when I was eight years old, my grandfather, who was a country man, he was a gardener, lived in the country, he was incredibly worried because I didn't know how to kill a chicken, and I'm not joking. I remember he sat me down once and he said to me, "You need to be able to kill a chicken," because he was really worried because of his country lifestyle that this was the basics. Now, when I've got my first car, I had to understand how the carburetor worked and how the spark plugs worked, and I had to take it apart and fix it. And I worry that my nieces don't understand the basics of how an engine works. But the fact is, they get in their cars and they drive perfectly happily, and I've never had a problem cooking a chicken, but my point is, "Working out what it is people really do need to know, they don't necessarily need to know everything that you might think they need to know."
Dan Klein:
Heather has spent her career learning how we digitize and strengthened the way we are able to understand and process more data and information and create stories. Heather's unique viewpoint allowed her to master communicating the value data has as well as the power of sharing it. She's obviously incredibly gifted, but also, as you've heard, has a wicked sense of humor. As we move towards a completely digital future, data continues to be a prevalent factor in our day-to-day lives. Instead of rejecting or fearing its potential, Heather advises us to keep an open mind, be prepared to make mistakes, and most importantly, ask questions.
Business ecosystems are not new. What is new is that they are becoming increasingly data empowered. To realize complex opportunities, we need innovation beyond boundaries, democratized information and close collaboration between diverse players. Collaborative data-empowered borderless innovation is how we embrace a world of exponential change, and that's what this podcast is about. Thanks for listening to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke. I've been your host, Dan Klein. For more information on Zühlke's work, please visit our website.