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Articles by: Emma Gordon

Achieving linked data insights to improve lives: a leadership perspective

Following the publication of our Analytical leadership: achieving better outcomes for citizens report in March 2024, we are running a series of blogs to highlight examples of strong analytical leadership in practice. Analytical leadership is a professional way of working with data, analysis or statistics that ensures the right data are available for effective policy and decision-making to improve the lives of citizens. Everyone in government can demonstrate analytical leadership, regardless of their profession or seniority by drawing on the six enablers of analytical leadership and a ‘Think TQV’ approach.

The latest blog in this series is from Emma Gordon, Director of the £105m Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) programme at ESRC. Since 2018, ADR UK has been working in partnership with UK government departments and the devolved administrations to open up secure access to administrative data for research, at scale. ADR UK have co-developed models to achieve this in each of the four UK nations that work for data owners and researchers, and which crucially also have public support. Here, Emma offers her thoughts on the importance of being a leader who has come from an analytical background. Emma highlights how drawing on analytical skills as a leader can help us to balance and refine the evidence underpinning difficult decisions that have the potential to improve people’s lives.

The work of ADR UK has clear relevance to our analytical leadership findings, particularly the importance of ‘Fostering an evidence-driven culture’, ‘Embedding structures to support evidence’ and ‘Investing in analytical capacity and capability’.  Emma also highlights importance ‘Collaborating across organisations to add value’ by working with other organisations to enable the sharing and linking of data, which can lead to new and powerful analytical insights and associated benefits for both government decision making and the public.

I was delighted when OSR approached me to ask if they could feature the ADR UK programme as a case study in their report on Analytical leadership: Achieving better outcomes for citizens. You can find this case study in the section of the report that discusses the importance of the “Collaborate across organisations to add value” enabler.

Achieving better outcomes for citizens is at the heart of what the ADR UK programme is all about. In 2018, we set out to build a UK-wide partnership between government analysts and external researchers, to transform the existing wealth of public sector data into research assets and policy-relevant insights. This is now a reality. Our website has an ever-expanding suite of Data Insight publications, which showcase research findings spanning many policy and research themes in an accessible way. This is how we are helping to embed structures to support evidence generation, which in turn can then lead to evidence-informed policy and service decisions.

Getting to this position has been quite a journey. I carry out my role as Programme Director from within the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UKRI. The two main audiences I need to ensure we are constructively working with are Civil Servants (mainly government analysts) from multiple government departments and the devolved administrations, and academic researchers from across the UK. In other words, a very dispersed network of people from other organisations who are not compelled to work with us in any way. To gain any traction, this dispersed network of people needs to want to work with us, for the greater good, allowing us to collaborate across organisations to add value. We also need to ensure we have mechanisms and processes in place to be carrying out meaningful public engagement, to ensure we are building and maintaining the social contract to use administrative data for research in the public good.

From a personal perspective, being viewed as an authentic leader is very important to me. I want to be able to listen to stakeholders and partners from a position of understanding where they are coming from, even if I don’t understand all the detail, all of the time (that would be impossible in my role). I started my career as an academic researcher, before moving into the Civil Service then onto ESRC. I have no doubt this has helped me in my current role, as I need to understand the concerns and wishes of data owners, academic researchers and members of the public, if we are to truly unlock the public good potential of linked administrative data.

I would say my background as an academic researcher and an analyst in government also helped to build my tenacity and resilience. As any leader will tell you, these are important qualities to have, which you can nurture and build over time. I certainly didn’t start my career with these, but if you have a curious, analytical mind, it can be very satisfying to try different approaches to solving problems and learn from those experiences that didn’t go well (that’s a whole other blog!).

I also feel it’s really important as a leader to be continuously challenging yourself to learn new things, to you remind yourself what it feels like to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. After all, a lot of leadership is about managing change, so by definition, we expect those we are leading to be embracing challenges on a routine basis. For me, I do this through my role as editor for the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), so I can be learning about new methods being used to link and analyse population-level data, and be inspired by all the incredible research publications. I also do this in my non-work life by playing musical instruments. Re-learning how to play the piano after a 40-year gap has been truly humbling!

Another quality I have had to learn is being happy with ambiguity against a backdrop of needing to make decisions – big and small – continuously. The complex world we live in means things are very rarely “black or white”, “right or wrong”. The way I approach decision-making across the programme is to push big, seemingly insurmountable things forward in small, incremental steps that nudge things in the direction of a favourable outcome. Crucially, I make sure I have time to listen to the people who will be impacted by these big decisions, so their views are properly considered. As analysts, we are trained to deal with ambiguity in data. These same skills can be honed within a leadership context, to help us balance and refine the evidence underpinning difficult decisions and foster an evidence-driven culture.

At the end of the day, I must stress that a programme such as ADR UK only succeeds because of the quality of all of the people involved. Expertise and knowledge are enablers that help us to deliver quality in our work, which is why it is so important to be investing in analytical capability and capacity. Technology is another key enabler in us delivering value. For me though, trustworthiness is the magic that helps to build quality into human relationships, so that people want to work with you. It will not have escaped your attention that these three qualities, trustworthiness, quality and value are the three pillars of the OSR Code. This is why I believe analysts should embrace also being leaders, as our training sets us up so well for being authentic leaders in today’s data-driven and data-informed world.

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Blogs in this series:

  1. Fostering a robust government evaluation culture
  2. Transparency, integrity, and independence: the keys to improving Budget scrutiny and public understanding of risks to public finances
  3. Achieving linked data insights to improve lives: a leadership perspective
  4. Collaborative leadership: Drawing on our different strengths to answer important questions
  5. Ensuring that analytical leadership is fit for the future
  6. Demonstrating transparency and integrity to support public trust

Why Official Statistics producers are vital to administrative data research

Today, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) published their report on ‘Unlocking the value of data through onward sharing’. As Director of a partnership that exists to do just that, I wholeheartedly welcome this new guidance. The report makes clear that the principles in the Code of Practice for Statistics – which ensures they are high quality and have public value – extend beyond statistics production to data sharing and access.

From our perspective, statistics producers are in an enviable position: if there is data of sufficient quality to support decision making, they will generally have access to it. Statistics producers will also have spent the time needed to understand the data’s quality issues, and how it should be curated to support research and analysis.

This means statisticians are exactly the people who should feel empowered to help facilitate administrative and survey data being made accessible to external researchers, through appropriate routes. As the report articulates, this includes the full spectrum from publication as open data, through to using secure research facilities such as those offered by ADR UK and other ESRC investments such as the UK Data Service.

Of the data standards elements presented, the two that are core to the vision of ADR UK are that data should be linkable and curated.

By linking administrative data sources, it is possible to reach across traditional departmental boundaries to more fully understand the impact of policies on society. As is becoming clear in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is not enough to have good data about the health of the population if we don’t also understand other elements of people’s lives such as their caring responsibilities, job security, income, living conditions and ethnicity. All these factors interact to determine how different sectors of society will be affected, in terms of both health and other elements of wellbeing. It is only by linking this data and making it available to researchers, following the principles of the Five Safes, that we can properly understand the impact of the pandemic on society.

For data owning organisations to engage in the creation of new datasets for research, they need to know that the effort they put in is justifiable. This is why curated data is so important. Anyone who has been involved in setting up a new data sharing agreement knows that this is an understandably detailed and lengthy process. Knowing there is a commitment to continued curation of the data means the research value can be maximised, and the initial resource needed to make it accessible can reap rewards for years to come.

Moving forwards, we are aiming for datasets created as part of the ADR UK investment to be trackable. Public money is used to fund our programme, and we need to be able to show the public, data owning organisations and government the research their investment is facilitating. Building our published case study collection will not only make it easier for decision makers to find policy-relevant research, but will also help reassure data owning organisations that time invested in working with us is well spent.

At ESRC and across the ADR UK partnership, we are also excited about the potential for synthetic datasets to improve researchers’ ability to use data. These would help researchers develop their proposals, and could also play a vital role in training the next generation of researchers to use administrative datasets effectively. Like a flight simulator, they could enable rigorous and realistic training to be delivered, without requiring direct access to sensitive linked datasets which is rightly very tightly controlled.

ADR UK brings external researchers closer to policymakers, to support evidence-based policymaking. Statisticians and others involved in the production of Official Statistics are key to us forming this bridge, which is why the three Chief Statisticians from the devolved administrations, as well as a representative from the Office for National Statistics, all sit on our Leadership Committee. We look forward to supporting the OSR and statistics producers across government to deliver on the ambitions of this report.

 

This is a guest blog from Dr Emma Gordon, Director of the ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) programme at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)