This chapter presents a series case studies detailing regulators’ responses to market transformations led by emerging technologies. The case studies span nine countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Peru and Portugal) and a wide range of sectors (communication, transport, energy, environmental protection). They provide concrete examples of how regulators are responding to innovation in the sectors that they oversee with regard to harnessing the benefits of technological advancements for the purpose of strengthening the regulatory process, as well as how regulators are strengthening their own governance in response to the transformation of sectors under their purview.
Shaping the Future of Regulators
The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Economic Regulators
Abstract
Source: information provided by EPA. 2019.
The seeds were sown for this activity many years ago with the establishment of a small environmental informatics unit. This unit developed the first EPA website circa 1997. In the late nineties and early noughties the EPA began to expand its GIS and spatial analysis capability mainly through research fellows linked to Universities but based in the EPA. Some of these, in time, became staff of the EPA. Over time, the informatics team became more involved in the development and project management of IT products with less time available for assessment work.
The 2016-2020 EPA Strategy established a goal for the EPA to be organisationally excellent. One planned outcome was enhanced capacity in the area of organisational change and in the use of ICT to support reform and innovation.
In 2017 the EPA established a temporary Enterprise Architecture project team to reorganise and re-align the EPA ICT resources through the implementation of integrated structures. For this review the team:
Had site visits with peer organisations in the public and private sector to learn from their approaches.
Created a business capability model and a technology capability model that mapped out the capabilities the EPA needed to successfully run its day to day business.
Assessed the maturity of these two models to identify the current state of the EPA’s capabilities versus where it needed to be to achieve its 2016-2020 strategy.
Reviewed the ICT structures with input from EPA ICT staff.
This review process identified that the EPA had invested significantly in building up robust database management systems. There was opportunity to make more use of the data. Setting up a small team with the purpose of analysing data to gain knowledge and insights would allow the EPA to take this opportunity.
The Enterprise Architecture project team proposed a new ICT structure to the EPA Board of Directors. The new structure included a proposal to move three staff and two contractors with data analysis, spatial analysis and remote sensing skills to a new Analytics team. This proposal was approved by the EPA Board in June 2017. The team was placed in the EPA Evidence program and given a small budget from EPA core funds. No recruitment was necessary as existing staff were redeployed. The staff had been doing ICT development and maintenance work so backfilling the staff was a challenge: 12 months elapsed before all the staff could be completely assigned to analytics work. The team reported to the EPA Board of Directors in July 2018 to update them on the progress of the team (copy of memo attached) in defining a rolling workplan, establishing the skills the team needed to develop, inter and intra agency communications required and standards that needed to be defined for the practice of analytics in the EPA.
The EPA produced a State of the Environment Report in 2016 (Ireland’s Environment: An Assessment 2016). This report identified seven key actions (Annex Figure 2.B.1). These key actions can also be mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Source: information provided by EPA, 2019.
The Analytics team categorise their work plan around these seven key actions. The team reviewed the State of the Environment Report, held 30 internal stakeholder meetings and created a list of project ideas (with expected outcomes) for projects in each of the seven key action areas. The ideas are initiated as projects based on perceived value (urgency and expected impact of the issue or question), feasibility (available of data, capability of team) and the availability of an EPA subject matter expert to work with the team to provide expert knowledge about the domain.
In the simplest terms, the goal of having the Analytics team is to support EPA teams in getting answers to questions that would better enable them to progress the seven key actions of the 2016 State of the Environment Report. This should help teams to become more effective in environmental assessments, environmental enforcement and environmental advocacy work. The Analytics team aims to make it easier for staff to spot patterns and trends in data: reducing the time needed to analyse data should have a benefit to team efficiency. The Analytics team are building the capability to model data: the team has experience in trending and statistics but are building capability in modelling future scenarios to support teams in making the best environmental decisions. Finally, the team will produce new datasets which will be shared as open data via Ireland’s open data portal for others to use.
Application that provides guidance regarding electrical risks and minimum safety distances in transmission lines. It will be available in Spanish, Aymara and Quechua.
Use of drones for geotechnical supervision of open pits, tailings deposits, waste deposits and leach piles (2019 Supervision Plan). Information is obtained through the generation of 3D digital models of the physical conditions of the monitored components and the terrain’s topography, with greater precision.
