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 …
In life we perform a series of actions that allow us to achieve a number of different tasks or activities that contribute to an overall goal. Whether it might be taking the food waste out to the green bin, walking the dogs, or even travelling into work. But how many times in an actual day do we reflect???
On 26th June colleagues from Essex County Council, Essex Police, and University of Essex took ecda to the Catalyst Conference. This event reflected on the work of the Catalyst Project, showcasing the progress of the collaborative initiatives and highlighting the future potential for analytics in local government.
Futures Academy has allowed a cohort of people to explore and undertake alternative methods of working instead of traditional ‘go to’, ‘same old’ project team activities.
The last few years of hard work by Essex Partners this week culminated in the official launch of the Essex Centre for Data Analytics (ECDA) at NESTA’s City Data Conference.
As a team we place a great deal of focus of learning. We are always looking for opportunities to learn, and one such chance comes from the LARIA annual conference. Our last blog post talked about the awards we won at the conference. But what else happened there and what did we learn?
Last week some of the team went up to Birmingham for the LARIA Research Impact Awards and conference, and came away with three 'highly commended' awards for the Research and Data teams.
A picture tells a thousand words......
The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, a mouthful no doubt so don’t expect to see that again, let's call it the JSNA. The JSNA is a way of understanding what our Essex population looks like, how many people live where, what the health conditions are, what services they use, and where they are.
Now in its fourth year the Challenge Project is a collaboration between the Data & Analytics and the University of Essex. Each year Essex County Council sets a research topic, aka ‘the challenge’, to some of the best social science undergraduates at the University.
Broadly speaking, evaluation is measuring the worth or value of something. This could be a programme of work, policy or service. There is no ‘magic formula’ to evaluation. We all make daily judgements about the worth or value of something; only evaluation requires greater critical thinking and a structured approach.