The Challenge
Herefordshire Council invested a huge amount in creating data, but struggled to get enough value from that investment. This is because users had poor visibility about the data available, how it could be combined and how they could share it within departments.
The GIS Team at Hoople recognised that the answer to this challenge did not lie in the technology itself – after all, organisations including Hoople had been working with databases for years.
In order to get the greatest possible value from their data, Hoople needed to find business cases.
The Solution
The Team designed an automated technical process that facilitated this effect by:
- Running a nightly process so that fresh insight was available each morning.
- Picking up all the relevant data from whatever location or format it was stored in, avoiding the need to prompt the contributors to send in data.
- Running an ‘on the fly’ QA process that ensured that data creators knew when and how their data failed, and also protected the quality of the database.
- Storing the data in an open structure that could be combined in multiple ways.
- Combining multiple data sources so that users had the information that was the most valuable for them.
- Publishing data in a way that was most convenient for users.
Hoople has over 100 data processes following this structure every night.
They needed a tremendously flexible data management tool to deliver this solution, and this is why they chose FME.