Automated Intelligence secures a two-year contract with the Cabinet Office to “Spring Clean” its digital heap.

Published: 8 March 2023

Reading time: About 3 minutes

We are delighted to announce that the Cabinet Office has recently selected Automated Intelligence to deliver its “Artificial Intelligence Data Remediation and Migration Project.”

The contract will see the Cabinet Office use our cloud-based data analytics and migration solution, Datalift, to locate, retrieve and appraise its records, providing the opportunity to address its digital heap by automatically recommending content that should be kept or deleted.

Through a previous project using Datalift, the Cabinet Office has saved £0.5m per year on storage costs as the DKIM (Department of Knowledge Information Management) team developed their digital appraisal methodology against a dataset of 11m files. As part of this process, a time and motion study revealed without Datalift it would have taken 59 viewers a year to review these files for disposal, at a cost of £2.2m to the public purse. In addition, this process has ensured compliance with the public legislation records act whilst also enabling the Cabinet Office to explore the use of in-house subject matter expertise, data science skills and techniques to enable faster innovation opportunities.

In the recently released contract Cabinet Office stated, “Automated Intelligence’s digital appraisal methodology helps organisations decide which records to keep for permanent preservation and which records to delete, helping to manage the exponential growth of born digital records that has resulted in the digital heap.”

The two-year contract worth a total value of £473,000 will support the Cabinet Office’s “annual ‘Spring Clean’ processes in which it analyses the departments legacy information awaiting a disposal decision. Currently, the department’s DKIM team have 4.9 million files located in ‘holding pens’ where a decision needs to be made on whether to delete or retain the information.”

Automated Intelligence’s solution, Datalift, is already transforming the ongoing delivery of core tasks and capabilities carried out by the Cabinet Office. To date, the Cabinet Office’s (DKIM) team have utilised Datalift to “review, analyse and cleanse up to 11 million individual files held in 170 differing formats.”

The Cabinet Office states “as an automated decision-making tool, Datalift has been proven to deliver accurate and reliable disposal decisions, aiding digital archivists to greatly reduce the volume of ROT held by the Cabinet Office for the Apollo dataset. The model is expected to continue to deliver benefits including cost avoidance and enabling legal obligations to be met, including analysing c350,000 files per year for future ‘Spring Clean,’ exercises.”

Speaking about the recent contract renewal, Automated Intelligence’s CEO, Simon Cole said:

“We’re absolutely delighted to be working with the Cabinet Office on their Artificial Intelligence Data Remediation and Migration Project. Our innovative Datalift solution will meet the specific challenges of central government organisations. We have extensive experience and expertise to help these organisations manage their growing data and information challenges.”

If you would like to find out more on how our team of experts and solutions can help your organisation overcome the digital heap, you can request a free 1 to 1 consultation by clicking here or emailing us at info@automated-intelligence.com.