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Generating data and ideas with analysts
Generating data and ideas with analysts
The Observatory Team – 22 July 2020
Tags:
User research (/taxonomy/term/47) Capability (/taxonomy/term/398)
Observatory (/taxonomy/term/412)
The Observatory team explain the experience of receiving and responding to requests for
analytics, after holding 2 co-design sessions with Australian Public Service (APS) agencies in
May.
Participants included:
data scientists
content designers
content managers
web performance analysts
other data practitioners
Insights from previous Discovery research
(https://observatory.service.gov.au/research#discovery-report) suggested that various
reporting demands created challenges for APS analysts. We wanted to explore this to see if we
could find common challenges and solutions together.
What is Co-Design?
Co-design is short for ‘co-operative design’. It is a way to explore problems and possible
solutions with users and stakeholders.
Co-design allow us to share perspectives and reach agreements between a large and diverse
group. This often results in more robust and reliable solutions.
What we heard
We ran 2 sessions with approximately 4 to 6 people in each group. We began by discussing
how agencies initiated analytics requests. This confirmed our original research – the
unstructured nature of analytics requests greatly reduced analyst capabilities to deliver value to
teams.
There were also no formalised processes or tools for reporting and responding to these
requests. Analysts would screenshot data or copy and paste important statistics and share back
using inconsistent methods such as email, messenger platforms, and in-person reporting.
Stakeholders often didn’t explain the broader organisational objectives of their analytic
requests. This meant that analysts were producing insights that may not help solve the
problems or deliver bigger value.
Key themes
Key themes from this research included:
A need for more streamlining, speeding up, and prioritisation of requests.
Helping people make better requests that explain the business problems they are trying
to solve.
There are benefits to anything that provides answers quickly and simply, with minimal
effort from analysts.
More help for those asking for insights, such as prompts for insights and action in
response to data, so they know what to do next.
What we came up with
Some of the co-designed solutions shared some common factors:
Increasing data literacy within organisations.
Improving organisational self-service capability to make data easier to find and interpret,
so analysts can focus on deeper insights.
Using templates and frameworks to streamline and improve information going into and
coming out of analytics requests.
Our next challenge
The biggest challenge for the Observatory team is acknowledging that we are talking about
organisational culture and processes. These are some of the hardest things to shift as an
external team.
Our goal is to empower analysts to improve the services they work on. We are working towards
building essential tools and resources to give the right kind of support. This means that
analysts can have a positive influence in changing their organisation’s relationship with data.
Research and co-design showed that despite challenges, many organisations have similar
problems. We are beginning to explore what solutions might ease these challenges in future.
Stay connected
We’re launching a monthly Observatory newsletter to share updates on our work, insights we
uncover, and announce new tools and initiatives to help agencies. If you'd like to stay
connected with us, please
sign up to our monthly newsletter
(https://observatory.service.gov.au/#email).
The Observatory Team uses data science to learn how people interact with government, and
manage several whole-of-government data services.
© Commonwealth of Australia. With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and
where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license.
