Everybody wants a portal… what we learnt about what they actually need.
The South African Cities Open Data Almanac (SCODA) is a partnership between Open Cities Lab and the South African Cities Network. It is a city-centric data portal that provides evidence, analysis & insights on current and comparable information about South African cities. This helps inform evidence-based decision-making and reporting on the state of South African cities. (See the SCODA Codebook and Demographic Modeller for more information.)
Joanne Parker and Paul Figueira share how Open Cities Lab has incorporated in-depth user engagements to understand the expectations associated with data portal requests and pivot when those expectations change.
What is a typical data portal?
A data portal is a digital or web-based point of access to a collection of data that may be general, tailored to a company, industry, or geography. There are marketplace portals, search portals, media portals, access portals, and geographical portals, all with varying degrees of complexity and simplicity.
The application or users of the data portal determines the applicable portal type. Integration, consistency, and personalisation are essential components to successful data solutions and portals.
Whether a data portal focuses on an industry or range of industries, a fully fledged data portal addresses 5 data elements:
Why does everybody think they need a data portal?
In our experience, data portal requests are often based on a need to improve access to data. Organisations like city departments have troves of data that could inform better decision making and service delivery. At OCL, we wholeheartedly support city organisations wanting to make data more accessible and this is central to our work with South African cities and city data. But whether they need a data portal to do so, is the question.
Organisations that request a data portal have varying levels of data savviness, however this is not always a reflection of their organisation’s data maturity. According to Data Orchard UK, data maturity is “the journey towards improvement and increased capability in using data.” Through our engagements on SCODA we have learnt that it is essential to understand where in this journey a city department is at and where they want to get to. If a department in the city has a system for collecting, storing and sharing data and their teams need help visualising it to other departments or stakeholders, we can assist with simple ways for users to access their data via the portal and sophisticated data exploration tools for users to analyse the data. But if the data maturity of a city department is much less sophisticated, then it might be necessary to start with improving their data pipeline or data ingestion processes, and ways to store and access the data via the portal before developing data exploration tools.
Organisations often make a request for a data portal because they want to share data more efficiently or effectively, in-depth user engagements can reveal that the development of a data portal is not necessary but rather an improvement along the existing data pipeline is more beneficial.
We learnt that making their data accessible requires data governance
Making an organisation’s data accessible via a data portal is superseded by the need for data governance. At the enterprise level, data governance encompasses the people, processes, and information technology required to create a consistent and proper handling of an organization’s data across the business enterprise. This involves the technical capacity to:
- Collect and ingest data
- Structure and validate data
- Store and share data
- Uphold data privacy and security requirements
- Analyse and interpret data for internal or external use
These data governance aspects are often considered softer data elements but are key considerations of data solutions like SCODA. A city or organisations’ data maturity is also closely linked to these competencies. And this determines the level of readiness that’s required before one can determine that a data portal is the most suitable data solution.
What have we learnt about empowering portal users to understand and use data?
The users of SCODA data portals benefit from explainers and visualisations to show them what’s interesting about the available data. It is not always obvious to our users what to look for in the raw data or how the data can be used. For this reason we looked at traditional tools like dashboards for inspiration. The complexity of the dashboard solution we create is tailored to the city we are working with and the end users.
Data Explainer: The products we create have a bit of narrative attached to them that allows the user to understand the data that is being visualised, without necessarily engaging with the raw data or metadata. We use explainers to empower people to read and understand the dataset they are viewing, but also so that they can potentially understand more about other datasets that they may encounter later.
Data Visualisation: An example of a tailored solution (tailored to the end-user not necessarily city representatives) within the SCODA project is what we are calling the Data Explorer. The Data Explorer allows users to look through all the SCODA indicators and create a very simple visualisation of what the indicator represents. The indicators used in the Data Explorer are visualisations that add value to indicators that are often described using words or numbers, as opposed to visually. This feature allows us to understand the use of city indicators beyond the uses described in the codebook.
Data Mapping: We also develop mapping tools like the Demographic Modeller to understand table-based data and interpret that more mathematically or visually because we have experienced that not a lot of people are trained to understand table-based numbers. Through communication with various city representatives, we have been able to make the shift toward a more visual interpretation of data and see how we could use visualisation in communicating effectively from a city perspective. Use cases like the Durban EDGE Open Data Portal are a demonstration of how the SCODA approach can be adopted by a city and we are hoping to see more of that.
How do we apply design thinking and a user-centric approach to South African city data portals?
Design thinking plays an essential role in the solutions we offer and how we pivot when a solution we’ve created is not suitable for the user. As an organisation, we don’t know all the answers, we have tools and skills; but not all the answers.
User-centric needs assessments enable us to dig into the fundamental data challenges of a city. The needs assessments allow us to focus on the pain points that a city is experiencing with its data as an organisation, but they also allow us to identify what is working so we can attempt to dissolve the pain points without dismantling systems and processes that work. This approach also allows us to be honest and acknowledge when we cannot address an organisation’s data pains (temporarily or long term).
When working with cities, we have to embed solutions or new systems into an existing framework, as opposed to clearing the decks and starting over. Cities have unique and independent systems that are built into the national and local governance framework. This independence of systems can be a challenge because these systems are not always compatible as they have been developed in isolation. User engagements are a tool we use to navigate and connect pre-existing systems within and between cities. These engagements also help us implement solutions with as little friction as possible.
User engagements can give us insight into the data readiness of city representatives and an in-depth understanding of city processes. An awareness of the data readiness of a city organisation as well as awareness of city processes shapes how we engage with the next city or a different department within the same city.
Written by Anele Ngcoya
