Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic required all parts of the public sector to work together. In order to collaborate successfully and to protect citizens, data would play a key role. The Welsh Government created the Covid 19 Strategic Data Visualisation Platform, a browser-based tool that drew in and shared data from Welsh public bodies and other important data resources.

Fliss Bennée, Co-Chair of the Technical Advisory Group at the Welsh Government, describes how one team in Wales deployed an agile approach and platform to provide insight and certainty to decision-makers. Bennée had only been with the Welsh Government for six months in March 2020 when Wales and the entire world was thrown into a pandemic and an international lockdown. Leaders in the Welsh Government, local authorities, NHS trusts and the emergency services needed an ability to understand where in Wales the balance of harm would be greatest, and whether the NHS would become overwhelmed by demand. In addition, authorities needed to know when the protective measures were working.

To understand, react and protect the citizens of Wales, the Welsh Government needed to ensure the specialists it had within the government were analysing data, not spending valuable time collating and cleaning data from a wide number of sources and then distributing that information to other stakeholders. “There were some individual dashboards and data sets in Wales, but there was nothing that brought the Welsh landscape together,“ Bennée says of the need for a single source of data for public sector decision making. The TAC team (Technical Advisory Cell) had started with a spreadsheet in the early days of the pandemic, but to ensure all parts of the Welsh public sector could protect their citizens, Bennée understood the need for a secure platform that all accredited members of the public sector could access. “We didn’t have anyone in-house that could create what we needed,” Bennée says. “Our organisation’s platform was too tightly secured, and we didn’t want to create new databases or take other people’s data, we just needed to see it in the same place to interpret it. The regular statistics and digital teams within the Welsh Government were flat against the wall with demand, as were digital teams in the NHS.”