Welcome to the OCSI Blog! We'll be using this for short pieces on projects and conferences we're involved with.
The aim is to highlight issues of general interest. But we'll be staying relatively close to our focus on improving the evidence-base for public sector decision-making. So it will be more Sub-National Review than Strictly Come Dancing, more Local Area Agreements than Lewis Hamilton etc etc...
The debate over the “right” level of governance rumbles on, with politicians and think-tanks making the case for city regions (Centre for Cities Outlook 2010, and director Dermot Finch’s blog), regional development agencies (the National Framework for Regional and Local Economic Development identifies a pivotal role for the regional tier in joining up national and [...]
Read more...Government commissioned research published this week values local information systems (or Data Observatories) at up to £500K per year, significantly above development and ongoing costs.
By far the bulk of annual spend (ranging up to £130K) were staff costs, and system managers identified that the main area for potential saving was in reducing the time spent [...]
The fall in the number of people receiving unemployment benefit last month could well be another one of those green shoots (the latest economic data published yesterday is available on the Local Economic Monitor).
The September 2009 data showed that the total number of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) across England fell by 4,700 compared with [...]
Read more...The Audit Commission has just published their Is there something I should know? Making the most of your information to improve services study, looking at how councils use information to make decisions.
I’ve been involved in the study as part of the external advisory group, and was impressed by the effort put in by the Commission [...]
We are carrying out a review of data visualisation - how data is presented and brought to life using charts, graphs, maps, timelines, animations etc - for public sector decision-makers and researchers. The work will identify good practice in visualising data, particularly for:
analysing and presenting small area data (eg, below District level)
understanding and communicating trends [...]
Recently, I’ve mostly been … talking with different groups about gaps in their evidence-base for decision-making. There were many recurring themes, but two stuck out for me: the lack of good data on equalities groups. And also, that people weren’t always aware of the information that’s already out there.
So, in the spirit of joining these [...]
Early reports suggest that some areas may face difficulty in using the Place Survey for assessing progress against National Indicator targets. And at least one LA is reportedly in discussions with their Government Office over not setting improvement targets for National Indicators based on surveys.
Quite apart from the debate over whether the survey questions are [...]
Welcome to the OCSI Blog! We’ll be using this for short pieces on projects and conferences we’re involved with.
The aim is to highlight issues of general interest. But we’ll be staying relatively close to our focus on improving the evidence-base for public sector decision-making. So it will be more Sub-National Review than Strictly Come Dancing, more Local [...]
