The London Borough of Hackney (LBH) is an ambitious and forward-looking borough. The Borough, under new ICT leadership, is currently going through a major process of putting data and technology to work in order to better support its service design and delivery.

One of the critical building blocks of this service delivery is bringing together back office data ‘assets’ to support multiple types of applications. LBH had already developed a prototype Business Index, pulling together data from the Local Land and Property Gazetteer and other reference sources such as Civica APP for transactional and license data, Capita Academy for non-domestic rates data, and aiming to come up with a single view of each business in the borough, to support both analytical applications (for example, spotting trends in business rates collection) and transactions (for example, enabling streamlined shop front licensing processes).

Mastodon C worked with LBH’s Data and Insight team and an expert user experience consultancy to understand the existing prototype and build the knowledge gained through this into a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP provides an overall Business Index dataset, records for over 25,000 businesses are recreated automatically every night from the latest data, as well as an API which allows other developers to build various apps or web services using the data.

This gives LBH a solid foundation to carry on extending the Business Index with new datasets, and building out more applications for the data which support better service delivery, for example improving Business Rates collection, increasing data accuracy in license applications, and enabling broader analysis of economic development in the borough.