Essex County Council’s HQ is a big place. It needs to be, to be the base for around 8,000 staff. The office is organised by department, and us Data Analysts tend to hang around the first of five floors. Not …
All the most successful teams throughout any line of work have a number of core elements for them to succeed and excel within a safe and challenging environment. But what are pieces of the puzzle that make teams great?
Many of us will be familiar with the core elements of ethics within data and research, but we need to go one step further and ask ourselves: why are we gathering the data? What purpose will it serve and what impact will it have? To avoid gathering insight in a tokenistic way, we need to be clear about the reasons behind why we are doing it.
A few weeks back members from the Data & Analytics and Research & Citizen insight team attended their first ever ‘data expedition’ which was hosted in partnership by the Greater London Authority & 360Giving.
Essex Innovates is an exciting project aiming to transform the intelligence workforce across the whole of Essex. The aspiration of Essex Partners is “to make Essex national leaders using the power of data science and artificial intelligence to tackle public policy challenges”.
Last year the Research & Citizen Insight team were given the gigantic task of carrying out research into Essex Libraries.
We needed to understand our citizens’ experiences of using libraries, what they value about the service, and how we can create a library service that is fit for today and for the future.
You may have seen the recent blog telling you about what the Research and Citizen Insight Team do and thought it would be great to bring some of these skills into your own team…read on to hear about how we recently shared our skills and expertise with colleagues in Commissioning Services.
Data and analytics have just finished a 7 day challenge using agile working approaches to think about new ways of supporting the current conversations around Adult Social Care demand and budgeting and to develop a new tool to facilitate these discussions.
Historically the word ‘consultation’ has put fear and anxiety into many a local authority around decision-making with residents in mind; however we now need to embrace this as an opportunity to have a two-way conversation where opinions are exchanged, considered and not ultimately dismissed.
In July, Data & Analytics were invited to the Big Data and Analytics Summer School organised by the Institute for Analytics and Data Science, held at the University of Essex in Colchester. Four members of the team went along for various courses across the two weeks, and all came away with some really valuable experiences and knowledge
We live in a world where data exists everywhere. In 2016 it was estimated that 90% of the data that existed had been generated in the previous 2 years. But how can we make the most of this data-rich environment? That is the role of the Data & Analytics team.