Fluent Technology

Belfast City Council awarded Fluent Technology the contract to implement City Stats - a web based statistics portal using their ORIGIN platform.

Requirements
The initial remit was to produce a web based system is to maintain and manage all the data required by the council to deliver their Strategic Neighbourhood Area Profiles (SNAP) and meet the core requirements:

• Support the Council’s needs analysis.
• Improve decision making by ensuring that tangible evidence is maintained
• Empower users with tools to help with strategic analysis
• Help citizens identify resources at a local level

Furthermore there was a need to ensure that the system would assist in the delivery of the SNAP model by providing a facility to collate and analyse information throughout the Council, share meaningful data with appropriate parties, map services and key demographic and socio economic variables, and allow for future extensions, e.g. online area profiling.

Solution
Origin was selected as the ideal platform for delivering on these requirements. The majority are met by Origin "out-of-the-box” meaning that the implementation time frame is significantly reduced and the platform is easily customised to meet further specific requirements.

Origin has the ability to maintain and store vast amonut of datasets and is scalable to grow with the organisation. This satisfied all he requirements of Belfast City Council and was the ideal solution for information sharing within the council.

Value
City Stats contains over 200 datasets from a wide variety of national and local sources as well as custom data internal to the Council.

City Stats delivers the distinct advantage of managing and maintaining all the Councils evidence in one central repository. Researchers, analysts and policy officers have immediate access to tools to share, scrutinise and export data, generate tables, charts and maps, view quality meta data and produce and publish reports.

Claire Shortt from Belfast City Council stated:
"It is very important to share information internally, it is important to back up policy and evidence used to report. Origin helps with this as it shows the evidence and also council staff all know where to get their information"

The key benefits of the system are:

• Dramatically streamlined data collection and reporting processes
• Increased consistency of data definitions across all stakeholders
• More timely publishing of information to the public
• Tailored interfaces for users (e.g. my region, my data, my reports, my resources

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