Department for Education Partnership

Testimonial

Department for Education South Australia

“When we went to market for a partner to help us develop a modern data and analytics platform, what set Exposé apart was the holistic approach that they brought. Exposé focused not just on the technology aspects, but also emphasised the importance of improving our data governance, along with effective business enablement and change management. They have since proven to be a highly effective partner on our program. Working collaboratively with our team in the department, Exposé have played a key role in implementing the edAnalytics Hub, a highly advanced cloud-based platform which will assist the department with data insights to improve the learning outcomes for young South Australians.”

Steve Eatts

Program Director – edAnalytics Hub

Read The Microsoft Case Study

The Problem

The vision for the edAnalytics Hub Program is to deliver a world class data and analytics capability that ultimately improves the educational and development outcomes for young South Australians. With this at the forefront of the Department’s mind, they sought to reenvision how they used, accessed, and made data available. Data is increasingly forming the backbone of the organisation and its schools with data and educator professional judgement coming together to support and lift learning outcomes.The Department required a partner to build on their existing work. A key driver for this work was setting the right technical foundation by introducing a modern back-end system and retiring legacy systems, while ensuring that future aspirations such as empowered self-service and advanced analytics capabilities were considered in the solution design. This also included adopting an enterprise approach to data governance. The need to upskill a large number of data workers to support the cutting-edge technologies, processes and practices was also on the requirements list so how is exposé assisting the Department in achieving their ambition?

The Solution

Two foundational stages, Discovery and Provisioning, helped us understand hundreds of use cases starting with the business need, working outwards towards the requirements, technical and procedural needs, security arrangements, user training and enablement, and finally pragmatic governance.

exposé leaned on our tried and tested unique approaches to analysis, reference architectures, and variety of operational frameworks, training and enablement, all centered around business needs contained across a growing list of user stories. This ensures lineage between all the many technologies, processes, people and governance that will support the comprehensive data ecosystem well into the future. And a detailed security design ensures that data can be ingested safely from state-wide sources, and data assets can be accessed securely as appropriate by the various data worker personas designed within a persona model.

These two foundational stages, as will the subsequent stages, promote and rely on very close collaboration between exposéand the Department to deliver the edAnalytics Hub program in partnership.

The Business Benefit

Through a multi-disciplinary team approach, the stage is now set for this multi-year program to commence on sound foundations.

Procedures and guardrails have been defined leading to Training and Change Management to run alongside the evolution of the solutions and to empower data workers to adopt a collaborative data culture.

The technical ecosystem was provisioned, configured and secured to support all manner of data solutions from conventional reporting, through to empowered discovery and selfservice, and finally leading-edge advanced analytics capabilities.

A significant (evolving) product backlog was created with 500+ user stories that will feed into the subsequent development cycles bringing leading-edge data solutions across multiple domains, in an expedient, yet pragmatically governed way.

A baseline governance framework and roadmap was set, bringing together the processes and guardrails, technology, and people from which to build pragmatic governance.

We are all systems go… (watch this space for more)