Greater Manchester Information Strategy

Our vision is to create a better information ecosystem that realises the full potential of information; managing, sharing, and using information responsibility to help to tackle our most serious challenges and supports Greater Manchester's wider ambitions. For example:

• Many businesses build products and services based on public sector open data. Ensuring our data is findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable and, above all, excellent quality, can help businesses to build new products and services on the back of it.

• Public service transformation requires information about those services, how they operate, and what information is collected. Data sharing enables the collaboration needed to deliver place-based, person-centred services. While providing the right information at the right time can help make better decisions, the public sector itself needs to become better users of its own data.

• Information sharing is crucial to delivering better public services for Greater Manchester. Enabling this means overcoming the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to data sharing. We need to overcome these barriers that affect outcomes for families and individuals while ethically combining substantial amounts of data with advanced computational technology that meet public acceptability.

The strategy is guided by a number of information principles: 

• Doing the right things with information

• Valuing information

• Information-led decision-making

• Reducing inequality

• Forging strong relationships

• Building trust and confidence

• Fostering a culture of openness

• Empowering the workforce

• Connecting our work

• Doing things differently

The GM Information Strategy has six missions:

1. Foster trust between the people, communities, and businesses of Greater Manchester through greater transparency.

2. Promote and maintain the responsible and ethical use of information.

3. Establish inclusive and proactive governance to drive the strategy.

4. Enhance the skills, capabilities, and behaviours for good information management.

5. Develop and implement the tools, infrastructure and standards needed to manage and use information properly.

6. Create an information governance framework for Greater Manchester that acts together as one.

The Greater Manchester Information Strategy was approved at the meeting of the Combined Authority held on Friday 28th January 2022.