The Client
The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest dedicated grant funder of the UK’s heritage. Since 1994, its has awarded over £8bn to more than 44,000 projects across the UK. Its vison is to ‘inspire, lead and resource the UK’s Heritage, creating a positive and lasting change for people and communities, now and in the future’.
The Challenge
As part of a strategic business change and transformation exercise, the Heritage Fund needs to: put evidence and information at the heart of what it does; become an insight led organisation; achieve industry standards in data management, analysis and visualisation; communicate its impact in a clear and compelling way; change the information that it collects, how it is managed, how the Research and Data team accesses and handles it for reporting and analysis.
This will allow the Heritage Fund to better understand the real world impacts of its work, eg reducing economic deprivation, improving community wellbeing, promoting diversity and inclusion, preserving and improving heritage assets.
Our Solution
Working within very short timescales and against the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, we designed a comprehensive consultancy exercise engaging with stakeholders across the UK, both face to face and virtually.
We examined the use of data across the whole of the organisation, in particular with respect to reporting and analytics internally and externally, eg the statutory requirements of the UK governments and the ad-hoc demands of parliamentarians and the general public. We produce a compelling set of user stories, backed up by a comprehensive set of requirements to encapsulate reporting and analysis needs of the whole organisation.
We also designed a common data model and data architecture to support the development of management information and data warehouse solutions to address the user stories and requirements.
Finally, we also set out a set of recommendations and a roadmap for the development of these technical solutions.
The Benefits
- a clear understanding of the reporting and analytics needs of the organisation as a whole
- a technical architecture and data model, compliant with the Heritage Fund’s IT strategy, through which to address these requirements
- a prioritised roadmap, highlighting what needs to be done and when, supporting the business case for investment
- alignment with the business and technical aims of the other strategic information projects
- a firm mandate from the organisation as a whole supporting the change necessary to act on our recommendations