Bracknell Forest Borough Council

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

Bracknell Forest Council has a potentially useful vast amount of non-digital data, in multiple places throughout the organisation. This data is mainly paper-based and sourced from all manner of internal department, legal, housing, children and adult, highways services. With the recent emergence of Big Data and Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and all of the capabilities around mining information from data – what the authority has from data perspective could provide massive value to tax payers around:

  • Predicting outcomes.
  • Finding the best use for finite resources.
  • Suggesting smarter, quicker, better ways to do things.

The list is almost endless and the potential to extract value from the data is huge. The issue however is that firstly the data is not in a format that can be consumed by IT technologies, secondly we do not yet know what our highest priority outcomes are post data analysis. Within the authority we are currently do not have the finance to undertake a widespread exercise to digitalise our paper information, nor do we have the ability to carry out a deep dive exercise on business needs and how they may be addressed through better insight into historical data.

We would like to undertake an exploratory exercise to both take a sample of our historic paper-based data and convert it into a digital format and also to provide this to a provider of digital business intelligence to see what value we could extract from this data with an open brief. Parallel to this activity we need to undertake business analysis to understand the key business themes that might be addressed through better business analysis of historical data.

We believe that the solutions that might come out of this exercise have a widespread potential benefit for multiple authorities, with each set of common business issues potentially benefiting from the insight from the data we might gain through this exercise.

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Introduction to service design