Sprint Challenge: How Can Technology Help Our Business Support Programmes To Better Understand The Businesses They Support And The Effectiveness Of The Programmes They Offer?

7th November 2020

What the problem is, its background and context; why it's important to solve the problem, the benefits solving it would trigger, and the parts of society that would receive those benefits

There is currently a lack of consistency in the data held on businesses in relation to Business Support Programmes and across wider government interactions with customers. This creates inefficiencies in getting the support to where it is needed and in how we use data to more effectively support our businesses both here in Scotland and abroad.

Ensuring businesses can access support quickly and efficiently has never been more critical. The Business Support Programme (BSP), consisting of Scottish Enterprise, South of Scotland Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland and Scottish Government and Business Gateway representatives brings together the different agencies and organisations which play a role in Business Support.

However the types of support a single business may access, varies significantly according to the specific characteristics of that business and the economic circumstances, often with support available across multiple organisations (or indeed from outside the public sector). There is currently a lack of consistency in the data collection, storage & collation between organisations about the businesses which BSP organisations can and have supported.

While this challenge aims to address that specific issue in the longer term, it also aims to go further. We know that by better understanding and improving connectivity associated with the data about Scotland's businesses and the support they are engaging with we could transform how the public sector provides support to businesses in Scotland. We could better understand how effective support is, better target support where it is needed and work more collaboratively in creating new support mechanisms.

The first step is improving our understanding of types of businesses and which programmes of support they are engaging in a clear and consistent manner.

For this challenge the initial focus will to address the lack of consistency in the records on businesses across the BSP organisations. Currently different data about a particular customer exists within each of our Partners' systems (to differing degrees of/standards of QA; and different definitions) resulting in each of us only having a partial view of the complete customer information. This means there is no complete single view of:

The full range of customers being engaged by our Partnership

The collective products and services being delivered to customer by our Partners

The collective outcomes for those customers and how partners have delivered that value(e.g. what products, when, for who, and in what combination)

A key enabler to allow us to bring data together from across our Partners consistency in identification of businesses and language to describe businesses common across our Partnership. Without this we must rely on resource intensive, complex and error prone methods, such as merging records on a single customer using other data fields, such as company name.

For public sector partners direct consequences of this are:

Without expending significant work we do not know which businesses are engaging which organisations

Lack of consistent definitions meaning tracking activity against customers between organisations is difficult

This leads to:

Insufficient data quality and no single version of the truth to be able to have confidence in the customer record

Limited data sharing

Lack of consistent processes across and between organisations

Currently ability to share a view of customer depends on sharing technologies which is not scalable and limits comprehensive collaboration

For our customers:

Having to provide the same information multiple times across

For our partners:

No single source of cross agency history of engagement

See more information HERE