Spatial dashboarding NSW’s Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant applications

June 2020

Customer focus and improved government service delivery were the objectives Spatial Services set when developing NSW Point and Service Point. Fast-forward to 2020 and Spatial Services is delivering real-time location-based reporting that tracks customer transactions, including Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant applications. 

SmallBusinessCOVIDSupport_2 

The Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant dashboard (pictured above) provides Government decision makers with real-time access to live data about the take up of the Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant across NSW. De-identified data about the applicant is collected in a manner that ensures no personal information is collected. This de-identified data is then made instantly available to decision makers who can immediately see the locations of applicants and inspect the rate of take up of the grant offer over time. The interactive display then allows them to drill down to detailed generalised locations, time periods or both to get deeper understanding about identified data clusters.


Specifically, small business owners who apply for the Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant through Service NSW are better serviced as the information can be used to establish trends for better policy development, compare service provision on an agency or regional basis or quickly establish areas where targeted services are required.

Service Point is the solution

The development of whole of Government, real-time location-based reporting systems that track customer transactions has been challenging. Government uses a variety of information technology systems and platforms and this, coupled with the essential requirement to remove personal information, has meant that rich data well suited for comprehensive analytics has remained untapped. Spatial Services have developed NSW Point and Service Point to unlock this potential. Spatial Services has worked with Service NSW to address these challenges resulting in an innovative solution that can be used across Government to report most client facing transactions.

Online government forms often require users to enter their address as part of the transaction process. This means that address entry provides a consistent point across all transactions to collect key information for data analytics and this is the basis on which Service Point has been developed. 

Service Point collects and stores information about each Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant transaction. The address of the applicant is not stored. Rather, the address coordinates are used to allocate the location to the statistical Mesh Block, Local Government Area, electorate and/or any other appropriate boundary including service delivery boundaries in which they reside. In the dashboard image above, the data is displayed by Local Government Area.

Analytics dashboards across Government

Service Point and the related address validation service, NSW Point, are now available as reusable components of the NSW Digital Design system. This means that the services can be used in conjunction with any customer facing online form or business system where address details are entered and validated as part of the transaction.

You can read more about similar dashboards in Spatial Services aids bushfire recovery efforts on many fronts.

More Information

For more information about Service Point click here.
For more information about NSW Point click here.
For more information about the Small Business COVID-19 Support Grant click here.