How do councils currently deliver insight?
Councils broadly carry out the following insight tasks:
- Get a better understanding of the people that use their services
- Plan how to deliver outcomes they’re responsible for
- Make decisions on how to allocate resources
- Report and benchmark their performance to regulators and peers
- Engage with communities and stakeholders
- Evaluate how well they’ve delivered outcomes
- Redesign or transform how they work
- Develop a policy on future demand
5. What works well?
In terms of best practices:
Governance:
- Ensure there is a single senior sponsor to be accountable for the intelligence
- The project manager clarifies accountabilities and expectations with a clear plan and structure
- Agree on accountabilities between different providers of data you need to produce the intelligence
Relationships
- Build trust with people who need the intelligence and whose data you need
- Help people define their requirements for the intelligence
- Develop an awareness of who’s an intelligence expert on a particular issue or service
Resources
- Use common data & insight models & standards to be able to share intelligence
- Access and take part in networks with peers working on intelligence in your area
- Speak to people you need or provide you with data before scoping new systems
Expertise
- Understand the importance of data quality and how to assure it
- Test and learn how to use relevant research systems and models
- Develop specialist expertise over commissioning it
Why do people want to collaborate in sharing data or insight?
- Understand how to contribute to strategic priorities and outcomes
- Value the importance of their work or service area to the overall organisation
- Ensure their work connects with other complementary research or intelligence
- Identify what other information people have to get a better understanding of the issue
- Share how other people can use the intelligence they’ve provided to help their service
- Enable isolated colleagues to get support from peers and be aware of strategic priorities
- Share and access specialist expertise to carry out intelligence to anticipate and predict demand
- Apply their expertise and knowledge to other service areas, in particular, strategic priorities
What are the barriers in the way to people collaborating?
- Lack of time to contribute to projects outside of their current intelligence responsibilities
- Lack of need to access other people’s data or expertise to help deliver their outcomes
- The reluctance of people to share data they’ve got with others due to lack of trust or security permissions
- The reluctance of people to accept being quality assured on an area of their work
- Lack of strategic projects to contribute loses people’s interest in it
- Risk of overlap between insight activities, or people commissioning intelligence that has already been done before
How can insight support services tackle issues from start to finish?
