InstantAtlas Case Study
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Profiling Stockport Live
Background
Stockport Council is a Metropolitan Borough in the North West of England. The population is 284,500 living mainly in urban areas. Many of its localities cater for the relatively affluent. Three of its 21 wards are in the top 10 per cent least deprived in England. Pockets of deprivation - some of them significant - exist in all wards but one.
Problem
Like all councils, Stockport are driving through a broad range of e-Government initiatives to meet 2006 deadlines. It has also recently undergone an Audit Commission Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) where one of the Key Lines of Enquiry specifically require the ability to assess the socio-economic characteristics of neighbourhoods.
The Council and Local Strategic Partnership recognise that tailoring and targeting services effectively is vital to enable scarce resources to be prioritised and directed at those in greatest need. In 1997 an in-depth demographic profiling study, Stockport Profile, was first produced to support the analysis of spatial differences and continues to be updated. It has been widely used to inform social inclusion and service planning. However, as an exercise it produces one-off 'snapshot' reports that cannot be easily maintained and does not allow conditions to be monitored between reports.
Solution
Profiling Stockport Live, led by Community Services within the council, delivers a web-based statistical reporting tool, often termed a Local Intelligence System or Local Observatory. The solution has been developed on top of the GeoWise InstantProfiler combined with their visualization software, InstantAtlas. Profiling Stockport Live provides a range of profiling and advanced reporting and data visualization tools for a wide range of socio economic indicators relating to Stockport Metropolitan Borough. Data trends and patterns can be visualised using dashboards developed using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Data is streamed dynamically into these dashboards from a backend database. The administration module allows system administrators to load data, manage users and manipulate the content of the profiles.
Local level socio-economic indicators at different geographies are drawn from a variety of sources at a national, regional and local level. The application is now available as on the council extranet which considerably enhances the planning and decision-making capacity of the Council and Local Strategic Partnership to support their localism focus. It also supports plans for better coordination and improved services in priority areas agreed by the Council and its partners.
Verdict
The system is now live and operating successfully. New content is being added including the development of a range of pre-configured profiles and several thousand indicators at different geographies.
Sue Thomas, Project Manager, concludes “Not only has the value of the application proved very high for the delivery of dynamic area profiles to replace our paper-based snapshots, it has also proved invaluable for meeting our obligations under CPA. It allows us to share data securely amongst our partners and provide detailed socio-economic breakdowns of our communities, both specified in the Key Lines of Enquiry. We also see it being of great value for supporting the neighbourhood level information sharing demands of Local Area Agreements.”
Case Study Keywords - demographic profiling, geodemographics, statistical reporting tools, data visualization tools, area profiles, local area agreements, performance dashboards, dashboard visualization, data observatory, social economic indicators, spatial analysis
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