Open North has been working with municipalities to offer bespoke and often ad hoc support for several years, including with the Town of Bridgewater. In 2023, Open North was asked by the town to support it in developing an implementation strategy in line with the results of a privacy management program gap analysis the town had undertaken. Prioritizing and rightsizing the recommendations led to several important projects, like building a data inventory and providing training for the town’s data governance committee. However, it became clear through our work that a broader, comprehensive understanding of the town’s overall strengths and weaknesses with regards to their data usage as a whole, not just privacy, was missing. As a result, we endeavored to develop and conduct a town-wide data capacity assessment.
Having seen the importance of rightsizing the results from the privacy management program gap analysis, we recognized it was important that we not replicate the problem by producing overwhelming, ill-fitting, or unactionable recommendations. Indeed, throughout the years of our work in the Community Solutions Network, Montreal en Commun, and beyond, we have seen how smaller to medium-sized towns and cities struggle to prioritize and right-size digital projects, due frequently to an inadequate assessment of their own data capacities. As governments face enormous pressure to modernize and be more efficient, knowing where and how to begin is a considerable challenge. While a data capacity assessment can show an organization where weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities lie, many of the established assessment tools are not well adapted to the situations of smaller and medium-sized municipalities. Accordingly, our first step was to work with the town to develop a framework that was appropriate to their needs.
There is a contradiction at the core of an effective capacity assessment. On the one hand, the point of the data capacity assessment is to provide the organization with an assessment against an objective, i.e. externally developed and validated, criteria of capacity. These criteria need to be independent of the organization so the results can show whether there is a difference between where they think they need to be and where the broad field of municipal capacity research thinks they should be. However, smaller and medium-sized municipalities in particular are all unique. They rely heavily on staff with decades of experience, there is a high degree of personalized, unstandardized workflow, and culture and history deeply affect what is done and how. As such, as much as external and independent assessment criteria are necessary, they have to take these local nuances into account.
To do so, we radically redesigned the usual approach to leverage both subjective and objective questions in an interview format. To rightsize such a complex undertaking, we reworked hundreds of data capacity assessment questions in light of our knowledge of the town’s needs, culture, and structure. In this process, we also decided it was essential to get at how staff feel about aspects of capacity to bring to light their subjective, professional understanding of the state of the issue and to make an assessment against external criteria. We developed subjective and objective questions for numerous aspects of data capacity to tease out this difference and shed light on any potential gaps. We also decided that to ensure that the depth and nuance of the professional culture around data capacity was properly captured, we needed to conduct the assessment using interviews, not a questionnaire. This allowed us to ask follow-up questions, react to questions the interviewees might have, provide clarity, and probe further.
This process led to our second fundamental insight into conducting data capacity assessments for smaller and medium-sized municipalities. Interviews and a flexible interview framework are essential because many otherwise expert, knowledgeable staff are not schooled in data capacity terminology and will need to ask questions about the questions. As much as we had already written the questions with our knowledge of the town in mind, we still found ourselves answering questions and revisiting our own formulations. This interactive engagement around the capacity assessment questions themselves, as well as the answers, provided a very rich understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the organization, and—importantly—how they were experienced differently by different staff. This enabled us to provide much more actionable recommendations that were a good fit to the kinds of professional culture, knowledge, structures, etc. that exist in the town. An uncustomized, purely objective assessment would have missed all of that nuance and produced much less appropriate results. Such an approach is useful when attempting to compare across municipalities, but less so when the goal is to understand capacity challenges within them.
Going forward, Open North will be combining this approach with our other tailored assessment tools, for example, on privacy and cybersecurity, to provide wraparound yet bespoke data capacity services. Combining insider experience of municipalities not just as organizations but as people working hard to provide meaningful services with deeply thought-through assessment processes allows us to produce the kinds of recommendations that are well-suited, easily actionable, and sustainably effective. If you or your municipality is considering a digital project and has concerns around data capacity, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for an assessment. The following are the services we offer:
- Data management: Supporting effective and strategic use and sharing of data across your organization.
- Cybersecurity: Supporting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your organization’s data.
- Privacy compliance: Establishing compliance with regulatory standards for data privacy.
- Data hub development: Supporting inter-organizational data sharing and collaboration through governance models and digital infrastructure.