WHAT OUR DATA AND ANALYTICS TEAMS IN ICBs ARE LOOKING LIKE RIGHT NOW
By Rony Arafin, Deputy Chair of the Chief Data and Analytical Officers Network (CDAON)
The Model ICB Blueprint from NHS England makes it clear that data and analytics will sit at the core of how ICBs operate as strategic commissioners, with capability expected to grow over time. And yet, on the ground, teams are already grappling with the reality of increasing demand alongside a reduced workforce.
Senior data and analytics leaders from the Chief Data and Analytical Officers Network (CDAON) had come together on Wednesday, 20th May to talk about what is happening inside Integrated Care Boards.
Norfolk and Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West and North London, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, different parts of the country, different organisational histories, different pressures, yet the same pattern kept surfacing.
Teams are shrinking fast, expectations are not.
What made the discussion striking was not just the scale of the change, but how consistently the same issues appeared across every organisation represented, many teams have lost around half their capacity.
Not ten percent, not a gradual trimming exercise, in some places the entire functions have effectively been cut in half.
Norfolk and Suffolk described what it looks like on the ground, team reduced significantly across two legacy organisations to a newly merged ICB, yet the work has not become simpler. Quite the opposite, the expectation now is to deliver deeper strategic insight, stronger evaluation capability, and greater support for commissioning decisions, all with significantly fewer people. Demand has not simply disappeared because capacity has.
In fact, several leaders argued the questions being asked of analytics teams are becoming more complex than ever. The challenge is no longer simply producing reports. Teams are increasingly expected to demonstrate impact, support transformation programmes, evaluate neighbourhood models, and provide evidence that can stand up to financial scrutiny.
To make things work, ruthless prioritisation is the only workable response.
Greater Manchester had protected more of its analytics infrastructure than others, largely because executive leadership understood its value early on. Even so, for years the system had survived by quietly deprioritising work rather than truly stopping it. Requests would drift into the background, deadlines would move, unfinished projects would linger.
That approach no longer works.
One of the more interesting ideas discussed came from a dedicated sprint team made up of four analysts focused entirely on time-limited delivery work. Not a permanent firefighting unit and not tied to one programme, but a flexible capability designed to finish things properly.
In West and North London, they took an even more radical approach, they stop all reporting activity until the team could properly assess which outputs were genuinely valuable., expectation is that around 75% of existing reports will ultimately disappear.
It sounds dramatic at first, but the reasoning felt very reasonable given the challenging environment we are operating in.
You cannot build the future while endlessly maintaining the past.
Meanwhile, Surrey, Sussex and Kent described the complexity of trying to bring together three very different organisational environments. Different infrastructure, different methodologies, different approaches to neighbourhood analytics. Before strategic ambitions can fully materialise, there is foundational work still to do.
Yet even through those challenges, one point came through clearly.
ICBs increasingly need to demonstrate that they can use data effectively to shape commissioning decisions and prove impact. Without that capability, difficult questions about purpose and value will inevitably follow.
We will be watching closely as the Skills Development Network publishes the analysis of the annual DDaT workforce census on behalf of NHS England.
One particularly striking and interesting insight emerged from the discussion.
Across the NHS, teams regularly admire each other’s work. They attend conferences, share presentations, praise innovative dashboards and analytical approaches. But too often, the sharing stops there, code is not shared, methodology stays local, tooling remains siloed inside individual organisations.
The assumption is usually that local differences make reuse difficult. In reality, that is often not true. And perhaps that is one of the biggest underlying challenges we have right now. Not simply funding pressures or restructuring, but the gap between collaboration in principle and collaboration in practice.
There is a great deal of talent, honesty and thoughtful thinking across these teams, the real question is whether the Data and Analytics functions can move beyond parallel reinvention and start building genuinely shared data and analytics solutions and capabilities together.
We all have a role to play in this.