The situation The volume of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests the Council receives is huge. In the 43 months from December 2019 to July 2023, Essex County Council (ECC) received more than 6,000 FOI requests. This meant that on average, …
What happens when the one person who has all the knowledge on a certain process leaves your team? Panic? That “this is fine” meme (you all know the one)? Or take a breath and look for any opportunities to review …
Essex County Council is massive. There are around 12,000 employees. It’s the second biggest local authority in the country, geographically, and it’s the second largest spending authority (which makes sense, given the size thing I just mentioned). There are hundreds …
Council tax is inherently ‘unsexy’. It doesn’t hit the headlines all too often, let alone national news. In the media it’s an oft-neglected, much-maligned thing. In fact, you’re probably already thinking of closing this blog. Why on Earth would I …
In the age of 'fake news', making accurate, attractive, and informative plots is essential in bridging the gap between people and data. In Part 2 of his blog, Dr Dave Clark, takes us through the possibilities of visualising data using R so that we can tell an impactful story.
Dr Dave Clark, a researcher within the School of Life Sciences and Institute for Analytics and Data Science at the University of Essex answers our challenge: How can I build visualisations that can easily be tuned to different audiences?
Dashboards are an increasing trend and great for aiding transparency and communicating complex data in a clear and simple format. But creating one can be time consuming! We explore whether it's possible to build a dashboard in a day...
Don't worry, we're not here to solve that particular conundrum, instead let's embrace the sentiment in our data philosophy and apply it to our communication. After all the best insight in the world isn’t worth anything if no one can …
Encouraging organisational leaders to “do” data At ecda, we often talk about data analytics being a team activity. As well as analysts, we need experts in information governance, data processing, communications and project management. But we haven’t talked much about the people who …
Welcome to the new Essex Centre for Data Analytics blog!
We're starting with a celebration as ecda turns two! Find out about our year of collaboration, and what our new blog has in store!