The ICO exists to empower you through information.

We expect to further improve our level of data maturity and to continue delivering value through data and analytics beyond the first year of our implementation plan (2024/25).

The following list is not exhaustive, but shows the likely areas of focus over the coming years:

  • Widening our data governance effort to new areas of the organisation. Our growing data stewardship network will help identify our key data and will support the population of business term definitions for a greater understanding and context.
  • Exploring other areas of data stewardship and data governance. For example, creating business rules to support a comprehensive data quality framework, creating metadata to promote organisation-wide, consistent understanding of data, and how data stewards can help resolve data issues that impact decision making.
  • Furthering of our data literacy initiative, and creating a data professional learning pathway, supporting colleagues to develop the knowledge and skills required for specialist roles
  • Continuously reviewing how our existing data community, the DAN, can best support the growth in data initiatives and capabilities as our strategy progresses. This may lead to, for example, establishing centres of excellence to bring together sub-sections of our data community into specialist areas of interest.
  • Implementing our data and analytics platform and the population of key data to support data and analytics.
  • Developing our analytics capability – moving from largely descriptive analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics, and building competency in the areas of AI, data science and decision science.
  • Building relationships with academia, allowing us to promote the ICO as an attractive destination for data and analytics talent, and to explore opportunities to collaborate on relevant research topics.