Public sector

We work with local councils and other public sector organisations, improving lives through effective use of data.

Together we could regenerate high streets, improve adult or child social care or enhance public policy around green spaces. Read on to find out more about services which could benefit you.

Funding to work with our researchers

Across four universities our researchers investigate four streams which have the potential to benefit society, and they're available to work with you on a project which matters to your organisation and community. The Support for Vulnerable People stream investigates the support that vulnerable people need and could help you to make services more effective. Our Local Economic Growth stream investigates the key factors that hinder business growth and sustainability and can help areas to thrive. The Mapping Public Access to Green Infrastructure stream aims to address a lack of information across the country about where green spaces are and whether they are accessible to the public. These three thematic streams are supported by our cutting edge research on Methodologies for Big Data Analytics which ensures our research uses the latest techniques and maximises the possibilities of what your data can be used for.

Our Data Analytics Innovation Vouchers (DAIVs) are the perfect way to get a project with us started. The vouchers are worth up to £2,000 and can be used to pay for an academic researcher to spend time working with you on a specific project. We have received applications from a number of local authorities to collaborate with researchers across our partner universities on meaningful projects. These projects will assist the Councils in making the most of data analytics to update their processes and services, to make them more efficient and robust, particularly at a time of austerity. Example collaborative projects we have received applications for include:

• Feasibility studies to advise Councils on the data and approaches needed to carry out larger scale, wider projects.
• Data analytics projects to amend and build robust and user-friendly process models, such as pupil forecasting models.
• Evaluation projects to review the effectiveness of interventions.

If you've got an idea for a project then you can register your interest now, or you can contact us for a general chat about how we may be able to help.

Your organisation's very own 'Challenge Lab'

If your organisation has a specific issue, opportunity or other challenge you’d like to explore then ask us about our challenge labs. Experts from the Centre can come into your organisation for the day to run a challenge lab session with your team. Together they’ll work to identify ways to make better use of data, improve your processes or explore potential research projects we could collaborate on in the future.

Contact us to find out more.

Upskill your team with data analytics training

We can provide training in a range of topics from machine learning techniques and predictive analytics to visualisation and programming in R and Python.

We have carried out a number of successful training courses for the public sector. Training is either free, or at a discounted rate for our public sector attendees. Topics include:

• An introduction to R.
• Mining data from online sources using R.
• Intermediate SQL.
• An Introduction to GIS - this has focused on the use of both the ArcGIS and QGIS software packages.
• An Introduction to Agent Based Modelling.
• An Introduction to Social Network Analysis.
• Experimentation process.
• What Works? Processes and techniques for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions.

As well as offering places on our upcoming training events we can also organise bespoke training courses for your organisation. Please contact us so we can explore how our training services could help your organisation.

Here's some feedback we've had from these courses in the past:

“I found it all interesting. Being completely new to the process of GIS mapping (I have only ever seen the results it has produced in reports) it was really interesting to see how the layers of data can be overlayed to produce very specific data correlations.”

“All fascinating, was good to get a chance to be hands-on and make models.”

“I will [now] map the results of a research project which used a geographical cross-section in a regression model to visualise the results.”

Visit our blog to read what Ben Foster from Norwich City Council thought of our public sector training in January 2017.

We also host regular webinars which are free of charge for anybody to attend. View our upcoming events, training and webinars now or visit our Vimeo page to watch back recordings from past events.