New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, CDO: Our Data Principles Are in Plain English and Not Technical

(Oceania) Tracy Parsons, Chief Data Officer, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand, speaks with Maria Espona, Editorial Board Member, CDO Magazine, about change management happening in government institutions, and the challenges of introducing and implementing a data strategy.

Parsons, the ministry’s first CDO, says that any organization is set to fail in its change initiatives without having an extensive change management strategy in place. And such a strategy has always been a key ingredient in programs that Parsons has led. 

She cites the Peter Drucker quote, “Culture eats strategy,” and says, “You can have the best strategy in the world, but unless you understand your organization's culture, and from that understanding, form tactics to change the organization from how it currently manages and uses data to where it needs to be, you're going to fail,” Parsons says. “At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, data and information literacy is one of the key components of our strategy.”

Challenges are normal while introducing something new such as a data strategy, she adds. The reason that it hasn’t already been introduced is likely because the need for that strategy isn't understood, or there is resistance.

The ministry, she adds, had not been exposed to data’s benefits, so the first challenge was to work with the senior leadership to help them understand the opportunities for the ministry, how they could better use data to make important decisions, get insights, etc. Next came building an understanding of what exactly needed to be done to enable the data strategy.

“Things like the values and the behaviors come from our data principles, which I think will be the hardest challenge,” Parson continues. One thing we've done to be more successful is that our data principles were written principles. They're in plain English and not technical. Public sector agencies have organizational principles and our data principles line up with our organizational principles. In a way, we're creating a whole new language or way of speaking data or valuing it as an asset, and then using it. And then we're continuing to beat that language into how the ministry speaks.”

Sharing an example from the effort, she co-relates the concept of data stewardship with the core organizational values of Kaitiakitanga, which means stewardship. It fits perfectly with the concept of data stewardship, and Kaitiakitanga as a word is well understood in the New Zealand public sector. It fits not only with the ministry’s values, but also in the broader New Zealand public sector, Rogers points out. Kaitiakitanga is one of the core values of New Zealand’s Public Service Act.

“We are taking other concepts which are relevant to the data world and then applying that as a way of building understanding within the ministry, and the behaviors around how we look after our data and then the principles of how we use it,” Parsons adds.

She then points toward the major challenge — working in an organization that has never been exposed to data. “In my previous role in the New Zealand transport agency, a lot of senior managers and staff had been exposed to data and analytics, and the challenge there was to get people to join to do something which worked for the whole organization,” Parson adds.

Because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had not been exposed to the data world before, tactics had to be based on  “show, don't tell.”

“We've come up with ways to demonstrate what data could do for the ministry,” she explains. “For example, to build proof-of-concepts for senior leaders who'd never seen automated data products — for them to be able to see something which was working, which answered important decisions — was a bit of a revelation for them because they did not understand these things could exist. We're past that now, but in the early days it was quite fundamental,” Parsons concludes.