Our Data and Technical Services team uses state-of-the-art approaches to help organisations bring together, manage, and analyse their programme and research data.
From working with programmes to ‘rescue’ data that has not been well handled, to bringing various data sources together to provide more analytical power, we’re known for rapidly and efficiently upgrading the data resources of major programmes. We deal with the whole cycle of data management, from helping teams think through survey work and data gathering, to building cloud-based systems and user-friendly front ends for data interrogation.
We work with clients around the world to design and build intranets and Office 365 systems that help them work more efficiently.
Whether you are starting a new initiative and need an easy-to-use intranet put in place quickly, or just want to improve the Office 365 systems you already have, our Data and Technical Services team can provide expert guidance and build tailored solutions to meet your needs. Our consultants combine high levels of technical expertise with real life experience of how programmes work, allowing us to deliver exceptional solutions designed specifically for your team.
Our technical experts work with Scriptoria’s programme management consultants to design powerful, tailored programme management systems.
These cloud-based, mobile-optimised systems help teams track delivery, ensure that information and documentation is available programme wide, and track spend. This includes tracking often hard-to-handle measures like cross-referencing spend with measures designed to indicate impact. Examples of our work range from building and running programme intranets, to providing timesheet systems, and systems to track interactions with stakeholders.
Our Data and Technical Services team does not only deal with the kind of structured data produced by experimental research. We also provide big data solutions designed to gather and review large volumes of data.
Once significant amounts of data have been brought together, we also have the expertise to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to help clients explore and make better use of their data.
Because we work with many programmes based in Africa, we’ve also ensured that our team includes significant skills in hardware management, local area networking and physical servers.
From setting up programme offices overseas, to creating hybrid (cloud plus on-premise) solutions for data back-up, our hardware experts act as a safe pair of hands in low-bandwidth countries. Examples of our work include the set up of multiple RAID 5 systems (mirrored via the cloud and linked to micro-servers) to back up large data sets such as genome sequences.
Multi-dimensional data cube to track virus spread in Africa: To speed up the analysis of key data, we created a multi-dimensional data cube for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded West African Virus Epidemiology (WAVE) programme.
To do this, our consultants worked with WAVE scientists to bring together field and laboratory data going back five years from various plant virus surveys run across West Africa. We then used this to create a cloud-based data cube to allow the WAVE team to rapidly explore their programme data and answer a range of questions that could not be addressed when the data was held in separate repositories. This system is now being expanded to join with other data repositories in order, ultimately, to help create an Africa-wide plant health system.
Services provided: Concept development | Data collection | Data cleaning | Database design and build | Front-end design and build | System hosting and maintenance | User training
Programme results tracking system to streamline management: We worked with the Climate Resilient Infrastructure Development Facility (CRIDF) programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development, to create and maintain a system that provides CRIDF’s donor and management team with an up-to-the minute overview of the programme’s progress.
The system links reports from programme staff with online data visualisations of progress and automatic alerts when new updates are added. Housed within an intranet built by Scriptoria for the programme, this system is far more efficient (and cost effective) than the manual reporting systems used by most programmes.
Services provided: Concept design | Database design and build | Dashboard build and analytics services | Integration with intranet and monitoring and evaluation systems | User training
Dynamic dashboards to speed up research results dissemination: We worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Cassava Diagnostics Program (CDP) and the University of Cambridge to gather and standardise data from more than 10 years of crop pest surveys.
Once gathered and cleaned, this data was then incorporated into a cloud-based SQL database and used to produce dynamic dashboards. Using these, researchers could much more easily explore multi-country and multi-year data and produce scientific papers. The data also helped modellers at Cambridge working to apply stochastic models to anticipate random variations in virus spread.
Services provided: Data collection | Data cleaning | Database design and build | Dashboard build and analytics services | Integration with intranet | User training
