BHUBANESWAR: Development commissioner Anu Garg on Wednesday emphasised the need to strengthen data governance system in all departments through a common and standardised protocol to enhance governance, promote transparency, and foster informed decision-making.
Chairing a meeting on leveraging data-driven assessment capabilities at Lok Seva Bhawan here, Garg highlighted the importance of data for governance and evidence-based policymaking. She emphasised the need for adoption of state-of-the art technology in collection, analysis and dissemination of administrative data and use of advanced analytics tools for decision-making.
Executive director of Data, Policy and Innovation Centre (DPIC) Urmila Chatterjee spoke on the quick assessment done by the centre covering the capabilities of departments in data management, data analytics and areas for improving capabilities.
Issues relating to data sharing among departments, access security, storage, backup and data quality were also discussed. The need for robust and secure hosting infrastructure, backups, disaster recovery protocols, use of standardised formats and interoperability across systems and departments were highlighted in the meeting.
Chatterjee also emphasised on the requirement of quality data analytics tools to be handled by departmental officers for performance tracking, forecasting and informed decision-making. Partnership with academic, scientific and research institutions to provide insights on interoperability, protection of privacy and hands-on training by DPIC on data analytics to officers of the departments was also discussed.
The development commissioner advised DPIC to present the findings of the study on Data Management and Analytics Capability of the government departments with identified areas for improvement and capacity-building in the next all-secretaries meeting.
Principal secretary, Electronics and Information Technology, Vishal Kumar Dev, Higher Education secretary Aravind Agrawal, director, Special Projects, PR&DW department Jyoti Prakash Das, and senior officers of different departments and functionaries of DPIC participated in the discussion.