Infoshare+’s ClearCore solution transforms how City of York Council manages data and interacts with citizens across departments.

The challenge

To support the successful provision of key services, City of York Council (CYC) wanted the capability to accurately assess citizens’ vulnerability and level of need. A clean and robust evidence base is required to ensure the correct evaluations are made and support is allocated quickly, appropriately and efficiently.

To achieve their aim of accurate decision making in service provision and to ensure long term stability for system change and future digital service delivery, a need was identified to implement a Master Data Management system to consolidate data from their diverse and siloed data sets.

CYC had several objectives that were fundamental to the success of this project:

  • Identification and removal of inaccurate and incomplete data
  • Identification and removal of duplicated records
  • Replacement of multiple incompatible departmental databases with one central system
  • Scalable and futureproof system prepared for impending digital delivery
  • Achieve a single, verified and trusted citizen view

The solution

Infoshare+’s ClearCore solution was selected as the core component to cleanse and match citizen data. It uses a unique, evidence-based approach to deal with the disparities between fields. ClearCore provides an operational best view – including a ‘golden customer record’ – of consolidated data that is drawn from the best or most reliable information across all the source systems. CYC will be able to monitor data quality, duplicate entries and assess vulnerability using the matched citizen data.

Testimonial

“Introducing ClearCore as our Master Data Management solution has been pivotal to understanding our data quality at a granular data item level. With ClearCore processing our customer data regularly we can now report the performance of customer data in key systems, identify processes resulting in poor quality data items, present errors in the customer data clearly and provide a clean and matched customer record to support the organisation.”

Andrew Taylor, CYC

The process

The project began by creating a collaborative, multi-department team to bring together the disparate datasets and ensure citizens’ privacy was protected. As people will have numerous touchpoints with councils along their lifetime, from social care to education, there were a resulting 20 datasets from nine various sources using two distinct database systems. Each dataset was first profiled to understand key information such as data source, security and permissions.

Infoshare+’s ClearCore technology was used to clean up the data, removing duplicates and inaccuracies. Key citizen data items were then defined and matched for each citizen across datasets using a series of system identifiers and rules that had been vigorously analysed and tested. The resulting data was then consolidated into one central system. Using ClearCore’s flexible reporting interface, CYC could now observe a single, comprehensive view of each citizen, presenting relevant information from all council departments.

Poor data quality and duplicates inside the data sources could now be identified and acted upon quickly and efficiently. Statistics on the performance of key customer data items are reported through the organisation’s performance management framework to provide a “health check” for data sets, data items and data sources.

The benefits

  • More cost-effective and efficient use of time due to streamlining of data matching processes
  • A single citizen view based on consolidated data from across the organisation
  • Ability to accurately assess vulnerability and provide appropriate level of support
  • Implementation of new organisational standards for diverse types of data, improving inter-departmental efficiency
  • Improved data quality due to the identification and eradication of poor data and duplicated records
  • Improved customer experience with CYC as they will be more likely to receive the support they need, when they need it
  • With 10 different datasets, containing a total of half a million records, configured in ClearCore, it has been possible to replace 2 complex SQL Server Integrated Services matching solutions and many smaller adhoc data cleansing and matching activities. For the first time, we can integrate solutions around a core customer record and begin to improve digital interactions with customers

Testimonial

“I have been very impressed with the care with which the City of York Council approached this project. It was clear from the outset that they were incredibly clear on the importance and benefits of improving the accuracy of their citizen data. We are delighted that they selected ClearCore from Infoshare+ as their software of choice as it offers them the evidence-based data matching that was so important for meeting their objectives. We have enjoyed a very open and positive relationship with the City of York Council and are extremely pleased that we’ve been able to have such a positive impact on helping them achieve their goals.”

Pamela Cook, Infoshare+

In summary

CYC had its citizens data split across 20 datasets, making it difficult to make service provision decisions. Their aim was to clean up their data and create a single citizen view to aid assessments of citizen vulnerability and improve the support given to those in need.

They used Infoshare+’s ClearCore technology to remove poor data and duplicate records, match data items across datasets and create a consolidated, comprehensive view of their citizens.

This resulted in a host of benefits including improved data quality, a 360-degree citizen view and the ability to assess vulnerability and provide those citizens with the right level of support.