Tim Willoughby, CTO, LGMA - Presentation to iQuest Conference on Data Analytics in Carton House, Kildare. The Presentation focuses on Local Government approaches to Analytics - featuring Local Election Data and Building Control Data.

1. An open approach to data
analytics
Sometimes you just have to think about your data
Tim Willoughby
CTO
LGMA

2. Local Government Management Agency
• Shared Services to the Local Government Sector in Ireland
• Procurement
• ICT
• HR and IR
• Business Technical support and shared services – Finance,
Payroll, Planning, Housing, Libraries etc
• Shared service bureaus
• Office for Local Authority Management (OLAM)
2

3. 3 Pillars
Making sense of it all...

4. References
www.localgov.ie
Data.localgov.ie
Building Control
Elections

5. www.localgov.ie
• Service Catalogue
• Local Government Services
• Shared Registration
• Shared Forms
• Shared Payments
• Shared Document Management
• Initial candidate service – Building Control

6. Data.Localgov.ie
• Service Catalogue
• Local Government Services
• Shared Directory
• National Datasets
• Initial candidate service – Election

7. So.. What about analytics
• When you have a central service – you have central data..
• Toolsets used – none of them harmed for this presentation…
• Drupal, SugarCRM
• Excel (PowerQuery, PowerMap, PowerPivot), Notepad
• Dropbox, Amazon, Google, Twitter
• Talend, Hadoop, Elastic Search, SOLr, Kibana
• With help from AnnerTech, ProvidentCRM, Ostia, SindiceTech

8. BCMS Timeline
• Minister Decision on new Legislation October 2013
• New Legislation to be in place (live) 1st March 2014
• LGMA told to do development Mid October 2013
• 2 Tenders – Front end / Back End
• Front end has to be ready for 1st March – Registration / Forms /Payments
• Back end has to appear to be ready 1st March – not scale required
• Single Infrastructure / Data Infrastructure / ePayments in place
• Legislation still being finalised on 28th February 2014
• System Live on March 1st “2014
• To date
115,000 Documents, 6400+ Commencements, €1,300,000 fees, 20,000 registered users

9. Public Interface
Drupal Based
Use Existing Local Government Portal
Reusable Components
Registration
Forms
Document Upload
ePayments
LA Process Management
SugarCRM Based
Household Charge Infrastructure
Takes Data from Drupal
Back Office Functions

10. Shared Services
10
DRUPAL Portal
SugarCRM
backend

11. What can you learn from a year of registering
all building works in the state…
• Inputs
• 6500 Commencements
• 115000 Documents (500 or
more a day)
• 1.3m in fees
• 22000 registered users (Builders
and Architects)
• Outputs
• ePayments
• Building Register
• DATA
• Fancy Maps
• NLP Searches
• Open
• ANALYTICS
• Biggest, Most, Least, Average

12. 0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
09/01/2014
27/01/2014
06/02/2014
19/02/2014
28/02/2014
09/03/2014
18/03/2014
27/03/2014
05/04/2014
12/04/2014
22/04/2014
30/04/2014
08/05/2014
15/05/2014
22/05/2014
29/05/2014
05/06/2014
12/06/2014
19/06/2014
26/06/2014
03/07/2014
10/07/2014
17/07/2014
24/07/2014
31/07/2014
07/08/2014
14/08/2014
21/08/2014
28/08/2014
04/09/2014
11/09/2014
18/09/2014
25/09/2014
02/10/2014
09/10/2014
16/10/2014
23/10/2014
30/10/2014
06/11/2014
13/11/2014
20/11/2014
27/11/2014
04/12/2014
11/12/2014
18/12/2014
28/12/2014
04/01/2015
11/01/2015
18/01/2015
25/01/2015
01/02/2015
08/02/2015
15/02/2015
22/02/2015
01/03/2015
08/03/2015
15/03/2015
Total
Total
Documents Uploads per day / 115000

13. Time of day / week
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
00:00:12
07:05:18
08:07:03
08:34:06
08:56:25
09:16:37
09:35:19
09:53:25
10:11:13
10:29:00
10:46:29
11:04:11
11:21:49
11:39:10
11:56:46
12:14:19
12:32:22
12:50:48
13:09:17
13:27:27
13:45:30
14:03:22
14:20:34
14:37:59
14:55:09
15:12:06
15:29:15
15:46:10
16:03:07
16:20:31
16:37:57
16:55:35
17:13:48
17:32:28
17:52:44
18:17:07
18:42:53
19:10:50
19:44:56
20:23:23
20:56:39
21:29:30
22:05:57
22:56:36
Total
Total
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
Total
Total

14. Dashboard

16. Demo

17. If you think there is no building going on..
• (Link) Mapped Building Projects - 2014/2015

18. Money..

19. Local Elections - Analytics in action

20. Problem
Over 400 Local Electoral Areas / LEA
34 Local Authorities
38 Count Centres
3.2m Voters
Desire
To have all of the Count Data available
as open data as the local counts
happen…
Solution?

21. 1. Set up a Dropbox Account for each County 2. Each LEA set up as Separate Folders

22. 3. Agree and Set up Standards for data 4. Set up way of Publishing Data…..

27. Data collated Data Stored Data Mapped Data Socialised

28. Demo

29. What has changed to make all of these things
easier for us… for consumers
• Open Data
• Open Standards
• Open Source

30. Thinking Matters More!

31. What has Analytics ever done for us?
31
Apart from Decisions, Scale, Speed, Agility, Low Cost,
Enterprise Adoption, Mapping of issues, Data Standards, API’s, etc
Clarity, repositories of information, etc etc
GEO - More than just Location, Spatial Analysis and wider predictions possible

32. Now that we are thinking this way…
• Micro formats for all published sites
• Open Data for Builders / Architects
• Alerts / Decisions
• GEO Alerts

34. Conclusions
• If you don’t like our Analytics or Visualisations… take the data – make
your own…
• Start somewhere
• Understand your own data
• Use the tools you have first
• Communicate