Trusted modern Public Service

Trusted organisations value their citizens and their employees – implementing safeguards to protect their valuable data with the goal of creating transparency, ultimately helping to generate and maintain trust with citizens. Sean Redmond and Cormac Deady of our Infrastructure and Government team explore below.

Trust is now a defining factor in any organisation’s success or failure. Research suggests that a trustworthy organisation is one that demonstrates three key characteristics: ability, humanity, and integrity.

To take advantage of the new and emerging technologies effectively, organisations must incorporate trust into systems, processes, and products or services. Trust is built on consistent predictable action in the moments that matter, like keeping data safe, delivering the right product within the time frame you promised, using ethical business practices, complying with regulations, and partnering with credible third parties.

Trusted data and analytics
 

A trusted organisation has traditionally been anchored by the behaviours and decisions of trusted people. As people increasingly integrate technology and data into their daily tasks and outputs, a trusted organisation also requires trusted data and analytics. Despite trust being critical to the success of organisations, a recent KPMG study identified that leaders question the trustworthiness of their data – 92 per cent are worried about the impact on reputation.

In a recent poll run by KPMG Ireland at our Advancing Data Across Public Service event in October 2023, data quality emerged as the priority trusted data building block.

So how can public sector organisations focus on the right things to ensure trust in their data? Consider the following as a starting point:

• Quality of components
  Are the inputs and building blocks good enough?
• Effectiveness
  Do the analytics work as intended?
• Integrity
  Is the data and analytics being used in an acceptable way?
• Resilience
  Are long-term operations optimised?

Ethical use of emerging technologies
 

Another critical component of trust is using emerging technologies in ways that ethically and efficiently meet users’ needs and support the mission as well as comply with regulations.

Delivering the promise of emerging technologies such as Al and generative AI is not possible without including humans in the loop. For example, Al has no perspective, point of view, or purpose and requires humans to train, test, and tune.

Organisations should train the workforce to cultivate Al until it becomes a trusted core capability.