What is the Data Platform?
Our vision is to connect people to the tooling, systems and data they need in a secure and supported environment to streamline the delivery of the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) digital and data strategies.
The Data Platform is a data analysis platform currently in development at the Ministry of Justice, within the Platforms & Architecture team.
It will either integrate or replace the functionality of the Analytical Platform. We would find a suitable place for Analytical Platform users to migrate before making this decision.
We are developing the Data Platform because the Analytical Platform caters to Data Analysts but does not scale to the needs of people who work with data in other ways.
Reasons and benefits
The main reasons for developing the Data Platform are to:
- Meet the needs of Data Producers and Data Users – internal or external – to provide new ways of working with the Ministry of Justice’s data:
- Data Producers includes Digital Product Owners, Service Owners and System Owners
- Data Users may perform any of: data analysis, data modelling, data science, management information (MI) reporting, performance reporting, statistics publication
- Make it easier to find, access and utilise data than is currently possible, to improve the cost and pace at which project teams can deliver while reducing data siloes
- Replace legacy technology that is costly
- Offer a single source of truth for entities that influence decisions across government, to ensure consistency, accuracy and traceability of our data
Streamlining data sharing and analysis would be the main benefits of having the Data Platform. By data sharing, we mean combining data sets between offerings such as applications, systems and services rather than via email or dashboards.
Example use case
The following is an example use case of how the Data Platform might benefit users.
There are two services that separate teams manage: Service A and Service B.
- Service A contains data on available social housing
- Service B contains data on the number of people being released from prison that require social housing
You could use the Data Platform to create a system that shares the data from both services and shows a warning if there is not enough housing available.
You could then upload the combined data to the Analytical Platform for analysis and modelling.
In other words, you could use the two platforms together to self-serve data sharing, processing and analysis. This reduces the time it currently takes to manually access and combine data sets before you can analyse them.
Design and development
We are currently in the Discovery phase of developing the Data Platform.
Taking a user-centred design approach, we are currently conducting user research to help us develop two key areas of the Data Platform:
- Data Catalogue, which aims to improve data discoverability beyond the Analytical Platform’s Data Discovery tool
- Data as a Product, which would provide a new way to send data from a source to the platform, and manage that data; we call this the data product approach
The insights we gather influence the Data Platform’s requirements and design. This is to ensure we build a platform that meets the needs of its intended users.
We plan to communicate updates about the Data Platform’s development through our blog. If you have any questions, see the Contact page for ways to get in touch with us.