Data & Insight
Information people trust. Decisions people can defend.
Dashboards are easy; dashboards people actually use are not. This is the method Education Host applies to data and reporting work — grounded in my own years of enterprise BI and data consultancy — and how I keep the company's own decisions evidence-led.
Method
How the work runs
01
Start from decisions
Reporting exists to support recurring decisions. The first step is agreeing which ones — with the people who own the outcomes, not just the systems.
02
Trace and trust the data
Every question is traced to the fields and systems that answer it. Data quality problems get fixed at the point of entry, because reports built on distrusted data don't get used.
03
Enrich where it earns its place
External datasets — deprivation indices, postcode lookups, demographic segmentation — can turn an operational database into an analytical one. Housing-sector work proved how far cheap enrichment can go.
04
Ship small, learn from usage
The first release answers the agreed questions and nothing else. Usage data then decides what earns expansion.
Evidence
Selected data work
Enriching housing data for better decisions
- Problem
- A social housing provider's management system held years of operational data, but on its own it couldn't answer the questions managers actually asked about communities, deprivation and need.
- Approach
- In an individual consultancy engagement, I joined core housing management data with external datasets — indices of deprivation, postcode lookups and demographic segmentation — and supported the evaluation and selection of an enterprise reporting tool.
- Result
- Housing data that could carry real analytical weight, and a reporting tool decision informed by hands-on evidence rather than vendor demos. The kind of ground-level data work that now informs how I steer Education Host's data and reporting services. (Historic engagement; details deliberately kept general.)
Dashboards managers actually use
- Problem
- Organisations accumulate reports nobody reads: too many metrics, unclear owners, and dashboards built around what the data warehouse contains rather than the decisions people make.
- Approach
- Start from the decision, not the dataset. We work with the people who own the outcome, agree the handful of questions that matter, fix the data quality issues that undermine trust, then build reporting that answers those questions plainly.
- Result
- The method Education Host applies in its data and reporting consultancy — grounded in my earlier enterprise BI delivery — covering data quality groundwork, reporting design and the training that makes reporting stick.