May round-up of InstantAtlas stories

Welcome to the latest edition of the InstantAtlas blog news – our monthly round-up of projects where InstantAtlas software solutions are used to map and present statistics in interactive dynamic reports and profiles.

In this edition we review two case studies from Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council and Warwickshire County Council a forthcoming live webinar from the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, plus we introduce a new offering from InstantAtlas called the ‘Report Creation Service’.

Tailored to your needs – The InstantAtlas Report Creation Service

We make no apology for the fact that everyone working for InstantAtlas is excited about what they do – whether it is developing software that helps you to present data in an interactive easy-to-understand way, or helping you get the most from InstantAtlas. So when someone asks us for advice, or help with a project we get a real buzz. With that in mind we thought it would be helpful to explain exactly what we can do for you – especially when you find yourself short on time, resource and budget so you know where to come.

What does InstantAtlas Report Creation Service offer?

The InstantAtlas support team provides a service for anyone who needs a helping hand with report creation with InstantAtlas Desktop. This includes:

• Map data preparation
• Dynamic report publishing
• Report design and branding
• Preparation and loading of statistical data
• Performance tweaks
• Report deployment

Pierre, Head InstantAtlas Support, says: “We can help support with any aspect of report production with InstantAtlas Desktop. Whether it’s filling gaps in a multi-faceted project, or providing report creation throughout from start to finish, we have the experience to help make it a success.”

Learn more

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council

‘Using map presentation software to ensure services are delivered in the most effective way at Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council’ 

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council covers nine towns situated between Manchester and the Peak District. The council places great emphasis on partnership and has a culture of working closely with local organisations.

The council is part of the Tameside Strategic Partnership which brings together a diverse set of partners from the public, private, voluntary and community sectors to agree key aims, objectives and priorities for Tameside. The partnership includes the police, health service, Tameside College and Greater Manchester Probation Trust. To help the partnership get a better understanding of local needs, a Partnership Information Portal has been developed.

Getting started

Jody Stewart, Principal Policy Officer, Corporate Performance and Improvement at the council says that for many years it produced a publication called Quality of Life which included selected statistics about the borough. “The challenge was that by the time it was published the statistics were out of date,” says Jody. “So we decided to move towards an online data observatory that would allow people to access up-to-date information on a variety of topics and track this data over time.”

 

Read the full article

Warwickshire County Council

‘Creating dynamic online reports for needs assessment at Warwickshire County Council’

Warwickshire Observatory is the home for information and intelligence about Warwickshire and its people. Its aim is to be a centre of excellence in research, data collection and analysis to support evidence-based policy-making across the public sector in Warwickshire.

The observatory undertakes work for, and in partnership with, a wide range of customers across the county council and other partner organisations. Paul Larcombe is Corporate GIS Manager and he explains that although the observatory has used GIS software in the past, it has only recently developed a local information system (LIS).

“We found that we were getting more queries from the public and it was taking time to find answers so we decided that an LIS would help people find the answers themselves,” he says.

Getting started

The team looked at a range of suppliers but decided to go with interactive map building software from InstantAtas which was bought in tandem with Coventry City Council. A successful funding bid meant the team was able to start building the LIS and this also covered the purchase of OCSI data packs.

“The LIS is a still a work in progress but the focus to date has been on desktop dynamic reports and we have a range of live content supporting the JSNA (Joint Strategic Needs Assessment),” says Paul.

Read the full article

Forthcoming North American Public Health Webinar with Charles J. Utermohle, PhD

Our latest North American public health webinar in June will be presented by Charlies J. Utermohle, Data Analyst, Division of Public Health, Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Charles works in the Section of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion within the Alaska Division of Public Health. His responsibilities include statistical analysis of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for adults and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System for middle and high school students.

Webinar Topic
‘Automating InstantAtlas production using Access Data Manager’

In the webinar Charles will discuss how the InstantAtlas Access Data Manager can be used to prepare large datasets using the example of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).

Charles’ presentation will focus how Access Data Manager can be used with any dataset where there are too many variables to be efficiently handled in the Excel Data Manager.

Learn more about this webinar

InstantAtlas Essentials #26

‘Changing Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in HTML reports’

In this video we describe how to change the visibility of components on an indicator basis for HTML reports. This video compliments our Support document ‘How to Change the Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in InstantAtlas Reports’ which can be found in the Desktop Support area of My InstantAtlas.

YouTube version

InstantAtlas dedicated streaming server version

Monthly round-up of InstantAtlas stories

Welcome to the latest edition of the InstantAtlas blog news – our monthly round-up of projects where InstantAtlas software solutions are used to map and present statistics in interactive dynamic reports and profiles.

In this edition we review three case studies from Marie Curie Cancer Care, London Borough Richmond-upon-Thames and The Health Service Journal.

‘Marie Curie Cancer Care’s interactive atlas helps present a nationwide picture of end of life care in the UK’

Marie Curie Cancer Care provides expert care to people with terminal illness at home and in its hospices. Marie Curie has extensive experience in service design; redesigning services to deliver an integrated end of life pathway. The charity is also a leader in end of life care research.

Marie Curie’s End of Life Care Atlas was developed with the aim of providing healthcare commissioners with a detailed insight into end of life care in their local areas. Michael Cooke, Head of Analytics at Marie Curie explained: “We wanted to use online mapping software to bring together a broad range of data on end of life care across the UK’s health landscape.”

Read more >>>

‘Putting web-based mapping software at the heart of Richmond upon Thames’ local information system’

The London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames in south west London has a strategic partnership with a number of organisations including: the Children and Young People’s Trust, the local Health and Wellbeing Board, the police and Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare NHS Trust. The council decided that it needed to ensure that all partners had access to a central, consistent evidence base so that each could get a better understanding of need in the borough.

Read more >>>

‘How an interactive atlas created using web-based mapping software became one of the Health Service Journal’s top reads of 2012′

The Health Service Journal is the UK’s most widely-read trade publications for managers in the health sector. It is a well-respected publication and was awarded Medical Publication of the Year 2012. The HSJ editorial team is always on the look-out for ways to drive traffic to its website and has created a Resource Centre for readers who want to find answers and guidance on a wide range of topics. With changes to the structure of the NHS in England, the HSJ felt that it should provide an interactive map of the new Clinical Commissioning Group areas.

Read more >>>

Share your knowledge, work and learn from other data experts at the InstantAtlas UK Data Workshops

The 2013 InstantAtlas Data Workshops (IADW) offer a mix of presentation and open discussion giving delegates the opportunity to share ideas and challenges they face. Each workshop programme also features some great examples of how InstantAtlas products have been used by established users to create market-leading applications.

Find out more today

Past events – See 2012 User Conference 

Discover how the Bureau of Health Systems Development at the Arizona Department of Health Services serves the health needs of Arizonians with its new online tool – The Designation Mapper

InstantAtlas North American Public Health Webinar

Click here for details

Centro’s use of interactive mapping software and how it has created an evidence base to support spending decisions

Read the full article

 

How Team Bury is using data visualisation with time series analysis from Bury Insight

Background

Bury Insight is the Bury statistics and maps website which is funded by Bury Council. It is a shared evidence base that provides quick and easy on-line access to data, information, and intelligence about the borough of Bury, and aims to meet the needs of the local community, Team Bury (the local strategic partnership) and the general public.

Team Bury partners, including Bury Council, collect a wide range of data including unemployment, housing and health. The site also uses OCSI data packs which means that in all it compiles around 10,000 individual datasets.

Getting started
Scott Abotorabi, Improvement Officer at Bury Council, who helped lead the project to develop the Bury Insight, website says: “We previously had a series of static maps, which on their own they lacked context and it wasn’t easy to view trends over time. By presenting the data in a series of interactive reports we felt we could help more people understand the data.”

Read the full article

Helping the Local Enterprise Partnership members understand socioeconomic patterns with data visualisation

Background

Local Enterprise Partnerships are business-led partnerships between local authorities and businesses and other key partners in England. They play an important role in determining local economic priorities and undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs.

Created by the East Sussex County Council Research & Information Team, the South East Local Enterprise Partnership (SELEP) atlas was developed in Autumn 2011 at a time when the new Local Enterprise Partnership geographies were being stabilised.

The rationale behind the development of the atlas was to create a resource that would help the user quickly build an understanding of economic and social patterns in the region.

Read the full article >> 

Providing the insight to help decision-makers target resources more effectively with West Yorkshire’s regional Data Observatory

Background

The Yorkshire and Humber Data Observatory Programme consists of several initiatives each providing either tools or processes to collect, store and analyse data. This insight is used by local government officers, the general public and other stakeholders to improve understanding and decision making either within an authority or across authorities throughout the Yorkshire and Humber region. The West Yorkshire Observatory - a ‘one-stop-shop’ website for information and intelligence about West Yorkshire – is one of these initiatives.

Funding was initially made available through the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) and the Programme was part of a wider Regional Observatory programme including South Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. The project included a review of existing Observatories and the technologies they used to deliver the project. Following a review, it was agreed that a solution based on the Humber Observatory technology would be the most appropriate.

Getting started

A  cross-organisational officer working party was set up to develop the project which was designed to replace the five existing and independent systems run by Bradford; Calderdale; Kirklees; Leeds and Wakefield. In some cases these systems had been in place for many years and were based on differing legacy technologies. Most of these systems consisted of online tools that had become unsupported, or were out-of-date and the cost for replacing them was considered too high.

Read the full article

Darlington LIS – ‘Using data visualisation to help target the resources of Darlington Borough Council and its partner organisation effectively’

Background

Darlington is a market town in the North East of England and has been an important centre for railway manufacturing. It is well known for the first public passenger railway in the world which opened in 1825. Engineering still forms an important part of the industrial base alongside a thriving call centre industry. As a unitary Council it is responsible for delivering the full range of local government services for local people. In doing so it has recognised the importance of having a clear understanding of local need, whilst working in partnership with other organisations – whether in relation to education, housing, transport, crime, health or other services.

The Council has long recognised the importance of local information as David Goodchild, Information and Analysis Manager at the council explains. “For a number of years part of my corporate role was trying to make the best use of myriad sets of data and encouraging others to do the same. This was successful but at the same time we recognised we needed to do more,” he says.

Getting started

The Council was granted funding by the Local Government Association under the Customer Led Transformation Fund, for a project focusing on families with multiple needs. The intention was to collate a range of data, thereby facilitating prevention activities and early intervention in families. A local information system (LIS) was seen as being best able to provide ready access to a wide range of data, and be capable of development over a relatively long time period.

Read the full article here

How InstantAtlas is being used for census data reporting and mapping

Census data mapping requires software that is straightforward to work with and at the same time produces reports that are easily understood by a wide range of users with different technical abilities. A number of organisations have chosen InstantAtlas to map Census data and help commissioners ensure local services are delivered in the most cost-effective way.

Many have already updated their websites to include the first release of the 2011 Census data which was recently made available online and in tables through the Office for National Statistics. As one of the key sponsors of the TWRI Policy and Research Conference on the 2011 Census, InstantAtlas is at the heart of Census mapping in the UK and abroad.

Read more >>

The “KnowFife Dataset” – Running on InstantAtlas

Background

The KnowFife Dataset provides a one-stop online information resource for partners and the public in Fife, in support of both the strategic information needs of Fife’s Community Plan and the local information requirements of its citizens. Under the umbrella of Fife Partnership, InstantAtlas Server is used to publish data for Fife from a range of agencies. Users can access data through thematic profiles, and interactive maps, and can also create their own tables, maps and charts based on particular areas/data of interest.

The KnowFife Dataset is a resource for Fife Partnership, which brings together Fife Council, NHS Fife, Fife Constabulary, Fife Fire and Rescue Service, Communities Scotland, and Scottish Enterprise Fife, to deliver Fife’s Community Plan, building on the common boundaries shared by the organisations.

It includes profile information on population, the economy, education skills and training, health and well-being, the environment, community safety and other community planning themes. It is published using InstantAtlas, a software reporting solution from GeoWise for the management and online dissemination of spatially distributed indicators and/or statistics. Content is sourced from national datasets, such as Census, and Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics, and local datasets held by public agencies in Fife.

Read the full article

Staffordshire Observatory and the NeSS data tool

 

Background

Over the last few years, there has been a significant growth in the number of Local
Information Systems and many are now incorporating data from Neighbourhood Statistics (NeSS) alongside other data. Staffordshire Observatory launched in October 2010 and following high demand on the website users started to want access to more data which was continually updated on the website. The team started to look at the best way to incorporate NeSS data and this coincided with the launch of a new data transfer wizard from InstantAtlas that links with the NeSS database allowing users to extract the data they require.

Getting started

We spoke to Duncan Smith, Senior Research and Information Officer at Staffordshire Observatory who explains that following the launch with some key data sets, the team quickly realised there was significant demand for more data. “It was clear people accessing the website were eager for more regularly updated data,” he says. “This presented us with a dilemma because we wanted to add data such as NeSS but didn’t really have the resources within the team to upload data more frequently.”

Read the full article

TalkLIS from Geowise

Watch the latest TalkLIS interview with Stephen Croney, Information Manager, Improvement and Performance Service in Policy - Partnerships and Communications at the London Borough of Newham.

Click here to see video