Public sector data│Alma Experts - Ali Brown

Everyone that you know, your family, your friends, everyone you meet is dependent on

public services. The trains we catch, the moments we have to go to A&E, when we go through school,

and college and university, we are interacting with services provided

by the public sector. And so data improvements in the quality and the use and insight of data

can improve all sorts of elements in how we interact with public services, and improve

how policy is made. And that is going to affect and improve the lives of everyone in society.

My name is Ali Brown. I'm a director at Alma Economics. I lead our projects relating

to data and analytics in the public sector. So, I've spent my entire career working in public

sector data. Prior to joining Alma Economics, I worked at Deloitte for seven years, where I

was a director in their public sector data team. Before that I was actually in government working

in the civil service as part of their fast-stream programme, where I held positions at the Treasury,

Cabinet Office and a few other departments. Government data probably isn't what people

think about every day, they don't wake up, like I do and some of us in Alma do, but it's everything.

Government departments and public bodies, they sit on the most complicated but also

the richest datasets in society. Schooling, health, crime, the environment,

there's never been so much data collected about all these policy areas. And though government

has taken huge strides to improve how they manage and approach data and treat it strategically,

no government has fully exploited the data it holds or truly understands the potential of

the data that it holds, and that's what's so exciting about coming years. There is

huge potential for services, and support to citizens and the most vulnerable in society.

Alma has such a fantastic reputation for delivering complex and evidence

based insights in the most challenging and complicated policy areas and the

policy areas that are most important to society. I see a fantastic opportunity to strengthen and

go deeper with our support to our clients around their data. So helping our clients

with their data maturity, bringing together wider data sets to enhance the analysis we're

going to be doing for them. And delivering better evidence to support decision-making and policy.