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Brent Council unveils data clean-up plan

The North London-based local authority has bought new software to assure the quality of citizen data before it is integrated with key line-of-business applications.

By Miya Knights, 22 Sep 2008 at 12:18

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Brent Council has invested in data cleansing software to improve the consistency of services provided to its citizens.

The new software will be used to assure the quality of data held in the central Brent Client Index, which matches data from the back-office systems that support the delivery of council services.

Key datasets, like postal and email addresses, phone numbers and gender will be checked for consistency before the Index data is integrated into the council’s Initiate Identity Hub matching engine.

“Data quality is a critical issue for us in terms of compliance with data protection requirement, but also because good quality data enables better customer service provision,” said Tony Ellis, Brent Council’s head of IT.

The council selected Datanomic’s dn:Director to carry out the data cleansing processes and provide reporting metrics and dashboard features to demonstrate improvements in data quality to each council department.

Ellis said: “We are able to use improvements in the quality of our data to deliver improvements directly in our levels of customer service, reduce our cost of contacting customers and reduce instances of fraud through consistency and greater transparency of our core systems data.”

He added that the council gave the software provider 100,000 records directly from its Client Index as part of a proof of concept. “The dn:Director system provided a complete breakdown of statistics on invalid or poor quality data fields in just a matter of minutes,” said Ellis.

The London borough council will deploy the software over the coming months to cleanse the data on a daily basis of nine back-office council departmental systems, including social housing and care for children and adults, revenues and benefits, electoral registration, customer relationship management (CRM), complaints, schools and libraries.

The council also plans to extend the system to integrate with up to 20 of its back-office systems that will eventually feed the Index.

Ellis also said it would improve the time the council’s data stewards spend dealing with anomalies.

“This not only reduces the cost of running the system, but also provides a consistent means of tracking data quality, improving our overall service and fulfilling our legal requirements,” he added.