By Anastasia Dedyukhina
It is not uncommon for many project-oriented organization, especially in public sector, to lack strategic alignment. There might be hundreds of exciting projects run by bright individuals within one organization, but nobody really knows how effective they are compared to others, let alone which initiatives should be prioritised. Launching a new project under such conditions becomes more of a voluntary act of a single decision-maker rather than a strategic business decision.

Let’s take as an example a local council in a big UK city. It works on a series of projects with multiple stakeholders and financing sources, including NHS, police department, social workers, local transport company etc. Although the ultimate goal is the same – to ensure the wellbeing of residents of the borough, there isn’t much alignment of what all these stakeholders are doing. Sometimes the same troubled family can be visited by 3-4 different different social services which track their priorities separately.

As organizations grow bigger and projects multiply, they often start lacking unified vision, let alone when they are subject to multiple reporting lines. Unfortunately, at a certain point being simply a good specialist is not enough – coordination becomes no less important than management skills. This is where data specialists can help.

It might be a good idea to ask data specialists to help you create a set of KPIs which will allow you to compare apples to apples. To be able to judge, data specialists need to know what kind of data you already have and how it has been collected, as well as what your final objectives are. Please, note that this data should be in a machine-readable format, ideally in Excel. 

For example, if you are running 100 social projects and you know that next year financing will be cut, which should you choose?

Here are some of the things you may want to consider:

a) how much resources each of the projects requests (i.e. people involved, time and money)?

b) how scalable is the experience and how significant the result for similar projects in the future would be? 

c) how can you track and compare the outcomes? What would be a good indication of success?

d) is there an interdependence between the projects? For example, can we say that families who participated in Early prevention program are 30% less likely to get into the police program for Troubled families? If this is the case, even though you may not have any separate efficiency tracking for Early prevention program, you will know that it has an indirect impact on other projects so should not be killed.

By Anastasia Dedyukhina
Currently, the UK is one of the first states in Europe that opened it data portals (www.data.gov.uk) and already released more than 40,000 data files. Furthermore, the government is making £7m available from April 2013 to purchase data from the trading funds, and potentially other public sector organizations, for subsequent release to the public free of charge.

Why is open data important? It not only allows creating new businesses and jobs on the back of this data, but also more transparency and administrative efficiency. For instance, gathering analyzing data about cardiac surgery led to the discovery of huge variations in mortality data across the UK, and thus to the elimination of bad practices.

An interesting UK open-data project is UK Pharmacy that helps people in the UK find their nearest pharmacy via their Smartphone. They can search for a pharmacy/chemist using their phone's built-in GPS or via a place name or postcode search. London Cycle hire is another great example, allowing to locate and use London cycle hire on your Android. Crime ranking statistics allows tracking safe neighborhoods, Bristol water quality allows to visualize water quality around the Bristol area. One of the newest apps to appear using government data is an iPhone all called Your Taxi Meter, which uses live data from local councils to find out from a car's registration number whether it is a licensed taxi - so that would-be passengers can check on it before they get in. It also gives taxi fare estimates for more than 360 districts across the UK, using fares set by local government. Currently data.gov.uk portal lists 205 apps created based on the open data, most of them related to maps, crime, and transportation.

The UK has now a unique opportunity to become one of the leading countries in data science.

By David Asfaha
One of the principles that guides all work at The Clout is: Produce actionable insights using the most appropriate analysis techniques. The first point is about telling a story but also about bringing the data to decision makers in a way that matters.

The story the data tells often makes its way into a slide deck that is presented once and then shared internally. However, we know that a presentation with bells and whistles does not, by itself, have an impact on the organization.

First, insight takes time sink in. The people who act on our findings often comment that their best idea of what to do comes in a flash days after getting the data insight. The second point is that the insight is an idea. As such, if it has any value, it will be shared, discussed and used to build (and hopefully test) hypothesis. To fit into our users workflow in that way graphs, tables, etc. need to be at their fingertips so that showing a chart can be effortlessly woven into a conversation over a sandwich, blanquette de veau or any other situation.

One way to do this is by giving analysts w ability to share insight they are blogging instead of preparing for an important presentation. Borrowing from military strategist John Boyd's OODA (Observer, Orient, Decide, Act) loop, developed as a conceptual framework for decision making, the analyst observes and passes the information on for someone to make sense of it (Observe, Orient) and Act on it. The challenge is to keep this loop as tight as possible so that the fastest most efficient way is used to get from observation to action.

This obsession with delivering fresh insight is one of the things that differentiate The Clout from other similar players in this field. And we don't just talk about it, we act. For example, last week I gave presentation to the London group of R users about how to turn arbitrarily complex R graph into output that can be rendered and interacted with in an old browser such as IE7. This is so that an analyst’s output can run on anyone's machine to help them make the right decisions.

You can find the presentation here. Let me know if you have any comments.