Challenge 7.2: How can we use data about businesses to transform the design, delivery and evaluation of business support services across Scotland’s public sector?

Key information for applicants

Please note: you must apply for this Challenge via Public Contracts Scotland

Launch date
Tuesday 31 May 2022

Questions may be submitted until
16:00, Tuesday 21 June 2022

Closing date
Midday, Tuesday 28 June 2022

Exploration Stage interviews
Friday 29 July 2022

Exploration Stage
15 August to 2 September 2022

Accelerator interviews
Friday 9 September 2022

Accelerator Stage
3 October 2021 to 27 January 2023

Maximum contract value
£650,000

What does this mean?

Q&A session

A live Q&A session was held with the Challenge Sponsor team on Wednesday 15 June 2022 at 11:00. A recording of the session can be viewed here:

Why does this Challenge need to be solved?

The recent experience of providing support to businesses during the past two years of the pandemic has reinforced the importance of data quality and data linkage to the effective delivery of public services for business within the Scottish Government.  At present, data about individual businesses is held for a wide range of purposes across different organisations in the Scottish public sector. This data is often partial, fragmented and presents constraints to designing and delivering services to support businesses.  

Over £4.5bn in COVID financial support has been distributed to businesses during the pandemic, to help prevent large scale business failure and job losses. However, delivering this lifeline support has depended on data and digital tools that were never designed for this purpose. 

It is the role of the Scottish Government to help businesses access support, such as grants, for which they are eligible, and to improve the processes to support business should we encounter a further COVID wave or similar emergency that affects trading in Scotland again.   

To underline this – this is not a nice to have – Scottish Government and a wide range of other public bodies have an important role in providing guidance, advice, compliance information and financial support to businesses, and ensuring that we can publish data about how businesses have accessed that support quickly and accurately.

How will we know the Challenge has been solved?

This Challenge will be solved when the Scottish Government can enable better targeting and management of public sector support at businesses with particular characteristics, and align the services provided to businesses by various parts of the public sector from the perspective of the recipients i.e. businesses themselves. 

Up-to-date, consistent, detailed and accurate information about businesses and sectors would allow us to take a much more customer centric approach to targeting support. 

What outcomes does the Challenge Sponsor want to achieve?

The outcome we want to achieve as Challenge Sponsors is a more efficient and effective business support landscape. Looking specifically at the scope of this challenge, we want to identify solutions that will help us do the following things better:  

• Forecast the costs of providing support to particular types of business or sectors  

• Target support at those organisations that need it most, with a more sophisticated understanding of impacts on different types of business, 

• Validate that businesses applying for support are eligible for it, without having to manually cross reference with other sources of data to verify 

• Optimise conditions when delivering business support so that we encourage businesses in receipt of business support to act as good corporate citizens in terms of Fair Work and commitments to sustainability  

• Monitor and Report on progress of providing such support rapidly

• Evaluate the real impact of SG’s business support  – drawing on information that already exists and avoiding additional research steps which are costly and take time to implement and report 

Who are the end users of the solution likely to be?

The end users are likely to be all those who will have an interest in or need to access the public-sector business support offer in Scotland. These will likely include business owners, entrepreneurs as well as those that they employ.  

Organisational Users may include: for example:- Scottish Government decision and policy makers; Local Authority administration teams that are tasked with implementing corporate tax calculations for non-domestic rates; Business Analysts/Researchers in government and externally; as well as partner agencies such as Scottish Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland, Business Gateway partners and governmental economic advisors.   

Has the Challenge Sponsor attempted to solve this problem before?

Over a long while, there have been a number of short-term initiatives and projects in this space over the past 15-years. These have been led by enterprise, economic development and skills partners in the main but have not sufficiently cut through the data confusion in the business data landscape.

Currently, there is a team within Government for non-domestic rates that intend to set-up a Working Group with data experts to begin to examine how to update the non-domestic rates system from the out-dated one we currently have, following an external evaluation of the system by the Fraser of Allander Institute. 

Through successful bidding process in a previous CivTech challenge, the Business Support Partnership has developed a Master Customer Record Proof of Concept.  We need to understand the relevance of the master customer record relevance to our need and outcomes and/or anticipate that this could form part of our Challenge exploration. 

Are there any interdependencies or blockers?

There are likely to be many interdependencies due to the number of public, third and business sector bodies and agencies that may need to be involved in delivering business support at present.  These interdependencies could be technical operating systems and/or cultural in nature as the purpose and length of operation of organisations differ hugely. 

In terms of blockers, this is more likely to be development of mutually acceptable data-sharing agreements between agencies and Data Privacy Impact Assessments that serve different operational purposes as well as cultural.

Will a solution need to integrate with any existing systems or equipment?

In one word — yes.  Any solution will certainly need to connect with and harvest data from existing systems located across a diverse landscape of business support.

Is this part of an existing service?

We anticipate any output under this challenge to become part of an existing landscape of data improvement work that is happening in this general space of business support and business engagement.

The issue is that there are differing services involved in offering varying levels of business support but data is held only partially and for a particular purpose.    

Our ambition here is to make sense of this fragmented landscape and to solve it from the perspective of our intended users.  

Any technologies or features the Challenge Sponsor wishes to explore or avoid?

We do not envisage any technologies being off the table at this stage.

What is the commercial opportunity beyond a CivTech contract?

This CivTech Challenge is not the end of the story – only the beginning.   

We see it as a potential way of accelerating government to business market development about business intelligence in Scotland, by building on what the market has in play to deliver an exciting product that could ultimately use machine learning to deliver an analysis of business in Scotland once we are able to pool data into big enough lakes of data.  

This is bolstered by the Scottish Government’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation.  This strategy has an underlying programme of transforming the ‘culture of delivery’ at its heart.  This means that a digital solution (or a set of logically interlinked solutions) that registers, processes, stores and shares between the public-sector and private businesses in Scotland is only the start of what we need to do in terms of business analytics.   

We anticipate a variety of bespoke products and services could be built on top of this foundational activity. All these could offer commercial opportunities for the successful bidder(s).  

Who are the stakeholders?

Businesses are the priority customer and stakeholder for receiving the benefits of this Challenge.   

Other key stakeholders will be relevant policy and service provision teams in Scottish Government, Local Authorities, Enterprise Agencies, Skills Development Scotland as well as Business Gateway and Business and Sector networks such as Retail Consortium, Regional Economic Partnerships, CBI, Federation of Small Business and so on.  

Who’s in the Challenge Sponsor team?

• John Paul Liddle, Deputy Director, Policy and Governance Division, COBRAS, Scottish Government  

• Dinker Bhardwaj, Senior Policy Lead, Policy and Governance Division, COBRAS, Scottish Government 

• Lindsay Linton, Team Lead for Business Services and Lessons Learned, Senior Policy Lead, Policy and Governance Division, COBRAS, Scottish Government 

• Anouk Berthier, Senior Policy Lead for Non-Domestic Rates, Scottish Government 

• Sandra Reid, Team Lead for Non-Domestic Rates, Scottish Government 

• Sandra Dunbar, Data Analytics Workstream Lead, Business Support Partnership, based in Highlands and Islands Enterprise 

• Lydia Crow, Collaboration Support Manager, Highlands and Islands Enterprise 

Who’s in the Challenge Sponsor team?

This project would be directly delivering the strategic action outlined in the National Strategy for Economic Transformation: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-national-strategy-economic-transformation/ 

Bidders should note on particular Project 17 and Project 18 of the strategy: 

Project 17: Transform the Way Support is Delivered to People and Businesses across Scotland 

Who / We will 

Government and Public Sector 

Establish a programme to radically transform the way in which the public sector in Scotland provides support for workers and businesses. Building on the work of the Business Support Partnership, this includes reviewing the products and services available, tailoring them to reflect the priorities of the strategy, and targeting grant support to delivery of local and national aims. It will provide businesses with greater clarity on the support they can expect at a local, regional, national and international level through clear and consistent communication. 

Project 18: Measure Success 

Who / We will 

Government, Public Sector, Business and Partners 

Finalise detailed delivery plans within six months of publication of the strategy, setting out how the programmes will be taken forward, demonstrating collaborative working with business. These will be strongly aligned with other strategic delivery plans, including the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, and will be published and overseen by the NSET Delivery Board. We will ensure delivery plans and their actions take full account of different regional circumstances, especially in rural and island areas 

Evidence from business and their representatives in sectors is set out in Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation : Evidence from Industry Leadership Groups and Sector Groups (www.gov.scot)