Birmingham City Council delivers insights and efficiency with public data marketplace

Due to our size and range of activities Birmingham collects, generates, and uses an enormous amount of data. Freedom of Information Act regulations mandate that much of this data should be shared publicly, and we therefore created our Open Data Factory portal in 2014. However, while this approach made data available, it simply provided raw information, which was neither user-friendly nor up-to-date.

To increase the usability of our data portal, Birmingham replaced its Open Data Factory with a new public data marketplace, the Birmingham City Observatory. However, the initial technology platform we used was delivered as a managed service, adding to costs and making it difficult to administer internally.

We therefore looked for a more flexible, accessible solution. We chose to work with Huwise to create a completely new trial public data marketplace to demonstrate the benefits to senior management. Thanks to this approach, within three months, we were able to build and go live with a fully functioning trial site, which led to us securing long-term resources and support for the initiative.

Bringing together data from the council and over 20 other providers, such as the UK Office of National Statistics, the new Birmingham City Observatory launched in August 2024.

A self-service data marketplace, it features comprehensive information organized into nine themes, including transport, health, and equality, with every dataset provided with its own insights page to explain and give context to the data it contains. This enables users to easily understand information by quickly creating comparisons to other local authorities and averages for the whole country.

Delivering for a wide range of users

Making insights available to the widest possible range of audiences, whatever their data skills, is central to the City Observatory program. It is already heavily used by local universities in both teaching and research, citizens, voluntary groups and other public sector bodies, such as neighboring councils and health services. Internally, it provides the council’s 11,000 staff with access to a single source of truth – and as every dataset includes details of the data owner, it is straightforward to request more detail if required.

To further enhance usability, the portal’s Publications page collects a continually updated range of documents, dashboards and factsheets in a single place, filterable by type and theme. This makes data easily usable and understandable by all types of audience.

Demonstrating and monitoring outcomes

A key aim for the data marketplace is to ensure accountability and to drive improvements across specific metrics and indicators. A range of interactive Microsoft PowerBI dashboards bring data on the portal to life, covering subjects as diverse as housing, census results and deprivation. This makes it easy to explore and question data, and is heavily used by citizens, health professionals, councillors, and voluntary groups. This underpins greater collaboration across the city and wider region, helping target actions and drive better-informed decisions.

To make its data and insights accessible to all users, We rely on three key strengths of Huwise’s solution and approach:

We are now seeing major benefits from our data marketplace, including:

• A single source of truth

The City Observatory has established itself as a centralized data repository that is trusted across the council and beyond, providing a single source of truth in key areas and underpinning better decision-making. Data assets such as census and postcode data are increasingly being used by citizens, voluntary organizations, other councils, and healthcare bodies, leading to an average of 96,000 API calls per month since the marketplace launched. We are now working with the West Midlands Combined Authority to host its data, further extending the portal’s reach and utility.

• Greater efficiency

Despite having a small team, we are now able to manage our marketplace internally, without needing to pay separately for updates or enhancements. This is driving increased efficiency and cost-savings, with straightforward administration through the portal’s user-friendly backend. Due to the solution’s built-in APIs most datasets are updated automatically, following specific rules and processes, dramatically reducing administration time while still ensuring compliance and governance.

• Delivering more understandable, actionable insights

Every one of the 664 datasets on the portal has its own insights page, with data visualized through dashboards, interactive maps and graphs, helping provide a deeper understanding for users, whatever their interests and level of data skills.
As many of the datasets have been imported via API from other public sector organizations, the portal provides a resource that goes beyond our own data, deepening the experience and delivering on our key objective of turning data into usable, actionable insights.