Data Services

Data Foundations

Overview

For data to enable effective decision-making it must be readily available, well understood, and trusted. We are experts in helping the public sector transform processes to become more data-driven, empowering everyone in your organisation to make better decisions. Whether you’re looking to embark on your first data strategy, kick-off a focused project to improve data quality, or a design a programme to build your organisation’s data culture, we help you lay your data foundations.

What we deliver

We work with you to build the data foundations you need to support the change you want.

Data Strategy & Transformation: A data strategy will give your organisation a strong foundation to make better decisions that drive progress and change, better serve your service users and teams, and deliver on your policy objectives. It will enable you to leverage the power of data across the business, increase productivity and efficiency, and create new opportunities.
Data Governance & Information Management: To manage data effectively you’ll need to have the right people, processes and tools in place. Designing effective, practical governance will continually improve the accuracy, reliability and availability of data to enable increasingly insightful interactions. We’ll provide processes, frameworks and an implementation plan that ensures accountable officers, practitioners and everyday users of data have clarity over their roles and responsibilities.
Data Skills Development: We help organisations understand their current levels of data literacy, where their gaps are, and where to focus to achieve their strategic ambitions. Using our expertise and in-house capabilities, we can build and deliver comprehensive training plans to fill those gaps. You’ll be able to realise the value our investment in our own Data Academy, accessing learning materials, expert training and established partnerships with training providers. By increasing data literacy, nurturing an inclusive data culture and empowering individuals to use their data effectively, we’ll bring everyone along for the journey.

Tools of specialty

Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance solution that helps you manage and govern your data. We’ll help you create a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage.

Informatica

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud is the first and most comprehensive AI-powered data management solution. We’ll enable every cloud-native service you will ever need for next-gen data management, all in one platform.

Our approach

Discover: We believe delivering enduring change starts with engaging with your users, understanding their needs and the context of the organisation you work within. During our research phase we will agree a shared vision and objectives and develop and implement a stakeholder engagement plan. We will assess the data maturity level of your organisation to baseline your current capabilities and understand the levels of data literacy across your teams. Our user researchers will help you curate a backlog of use cases that underpin your case for change and compose a roadmap that stakeholders can buy into.
Design: Effective programme design is crucial for transforming your data foundations over the long-term. We’ll take the outputs of our research and work with your executives, management, and users to design your data strategy. We’ll collaborate on a to-be organisational design that will empower your organisation to get from A to B, embedding user research and putting user needs at the heart of your change. You’ll work with us to develop a practical implementation plan that is scoped to reflect both the challenges, and your organisational capacity and appetite for change. We will ensure the approach delivers that change in a sustainable way, with governance and reporting that ensures we can evidence the value-add to your board.
Execute: We are with you all the way through this transformation. Our team of multidisciplinary data experts will work alongside your team, to augment and develop their capabilities. Together we’ll begin the transition to your to-be organisational design, implementing agile ways of working and user centred design. We’ll kick-off new ceremonies as one team, taking part in Stand-ups, Sprint Planning and Retrospectives. You’ll use these to deliver prioritised use cases from the backlog, learning new skills through doing and proving the value of iterative development to your users and stakeholders.
Embed: Now it’s time for your team to stretch their wings and use their new data foundations to deliver sustained value to the business. We’ll increasingly take a back-seat but still be there when you need us. Our partnership approach ensures knowledge is transferred effectively throughout the entirety of our engagements, rather than relying on rushed handover meetings and lengthy documents at the end. During this final phase we will focus on ensuring active feedback from users and stakeholders is used to perfect your tools and processes, and carry out any final training needed to make sure your teams are fully equipped to deliver the sustained improvements needed to make an organisation truly data-driven.

Case Studies

Positioning Data at the heart of Innovation - Swindon Borough Council (SBC)

The council employs over 2000 staff who work to prioritise improving infrastructure and housing to support a growing, low-carbon economy; offer education opportunities that lead to the right skills and the right jobs in the right places; ensure clean and safe streets; improve public spaces and local culture; and helps people to help themselves, while always protecting the most vulnerable children and adult. As part of its pledge to compete at the forefront of digital innovation with a commitment to using
technology for positive change, the council wanted to improve organisational data management enabling it to more effectively use its data, lower costs and support new services.

Stethoscope - The CCG

The CCG was overloaded with datasets, spending a lot of time collating data from various sources for analysis. They required assistance in navigating the vast flows of data that the NHS generates and had a requirement to access this data through an online platform and automated reports, which could visualise benchmarked and predictive data for interpretation in a clearer way than their current and complex spreadsheets.