After a very long gestation, the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD) is slowly taking shape – both in the form of the building which seems to have leapt up in the last 3 months (the steel structure on Newcastle Helix is now complete) and with the first steps in recruiting the team who will animate the Centre.

As the newly appointed Director for NICD, I’ve been in full-time post for just 2 weeks and want to share our plans and keep you abreast of developments – as well as let you know about an opportunity next month at DataJam North East to get involved. I’ll start out by trying to clarify the aims of NICD and how we’ll set about achieving them.

NICD was born from ten years of research excellence in data analytics at Newcastle University, led by Professor Paul Watson, and the work of the Cloud Innovation Centre (effectively a pilot for NICD) which identified a huge demand from businesses and public sector organisations, large and small, for assistance in obtaining insight from the increasing amounts of data being collected.

NICD is intended not to provide the insight but to deliver new data skills to its clients so that they can obtain the insight themselves. As we like to put it, we’re in the business of selling fishing rods, not fish.

'fire-hose of data'

Our unique take on up-skilling is that we do it by working together with the client on practical hands-on projects that deliver immediate value. The people whose skills we are trying to enhance are already vital members of their organisation working to make sense of the fire-hose of data coming from web portals, apps, social media, and sensors. Organisations can’t afford to take these people away from the day-job and put them on long training courses, for which only some portion of the content will be relevant. So they often have to cope with trying to make sense of all this data using out-of-date tools and techniques appropriate for quantities of data orders of magnitude less. It’s come as a surprise to us how many large organisations are running on the back of an Access database and a huge spreadsheet.

Our approach is to scope out projects, typically running for between a few weeks and 6 months, that deliver actionable insight back to the organisation in a series of short sprints. This provides immediate return on investment and encourages the management team to drive the next steps. Our team (often with PhDs) sit alongside the clients’ staff who are actually delivering the project, providing advice and practical assistance on statistical methods, handling the processing of huge amounts of data, tooling for data management and visualisation and so on. We’ve already run two very successful projects on this pattern which I’ll blog about shortly.

The first chance to put to the test what can be achieved by collaborating to bring data and service design together will be at DataJam North East on 17^th and 18^th September. It’s a two-day event which aims to look at issues affecting the North East region through the lens of data and service design, to see what answers to real problems we can come up with. If you’re interested you can find out more here

https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/tag/datajam-north-east/

If you want a chat about what NICD can offer your organisation, get in touch nicd@ncl.ac.uk

About the author: Steve Caughey was a co-founder and CEO of Arjuna Solutions, a Newcastle University spin-out acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and then CEO of Arjuna Technologies whose technology was purchased by RedHat. Today he is Director of the National Innovation Centre for Data, working to help organisations gain the skills they need to obtain insight from their data.