Why government at all? What is it for – and whose is the data that is used? This session works through the approach that North Tyneside, with Engie, is using to reverse the way that question is usually answered.

We want our citizens to be happy, healthy, and economically independent. Success requires a sustainable compact between citizen, business and government – supporting both economic viability and privacy.

We are promoting a model by which we as a council become an anchor tenant of an approach that is driven by data at four levels: enabling the citizen, by making them the owner and controller of their data; enabling a trading environment of a defined service catalogue in which services from everybody can be packaged together to support citizens and businesses; correcting transparently for market failure where services need to be built in common to address a societal need (roads and bridges, district power, social and health care); and providing a safe, brokered analytics environment that supports decision making at every level from individual to government without compromising privacy.

Yes, its ambitious. But also self-sustaining and powerful, helping the local economy and optimising services packaged around individual need. It can support full privacy structures. We dont need to do it all at once, as every aspect can be developed and has value independently – but it builds into a mature, data-driven approach to enabling our children to be happy, healthy and economically independent. Most importantly, the approach scales and becomes richer over time.

Ben Kaner

Ben Kaner works for the North Tyneside Council/Engie partnership as Head of Digital Strategy.

Ben’s role is to transform the way that the council coordinates and optimises their joint service around the needs of the citizens and businesses of North Tyneside.

He joined the partnership from BT, where he was Head of Strategic Technology and Innovation for BTs Government and Health sectors. His career started off as a behavioural geneticist, before joining IBM in 1988 – before the web!

He has worked with local, central government and health sector clients through to national scale –mostly in the UK, but including others in the US, Europe, Turkey, Middle-East and Far East. His professional background is as an enterprise architect/CTO, driving innovation, engineering and information governance on large programmes.

When not working, Ben sails dinghies, occasionally drives a VW bay-window camper, plays piano badly, and restores old buildings, furniture, clocks and Victorian pianos.