Data Intelligence for Local Government? Assessing the Benefits and Barriers to Use of Big Data in the Public Sector

The concept of Big Data has become very popular over the last decade, with large technology companies successfully building their business models around its exploitation. The public sector in the United Kingdom has tried to follow suit and local governments in particular have tried to introduce new models of service delivery based on the routine extraction of information from their own Big Data. These attempts have been hailed as the beginning of a new era for the public sector where service delivery and commissioning are shaped by data intelligence on local needs and by evidence on the outcomes. In this article we assess this claim and the extent to which it captures the way local governments in the United Kingdom use intelligence from Big Data in light of the structural barriers they face when trying to exploit their data. We also present a case study on the development and deployment of an integrated data model for children services in a large county council in the South‐East of England.