The Arts Council commissioned Compass Informatics to undertake a review of internal processes to enable the measurement of investments, the impact on audiences and identify trends.
The Compass team developed a technical solution to enable the Arts Council to collect and store data from funded organisations so that better decisions can be made. The project team evaluated the data sources and designed programmes or work to define a suite of reports and stream data acquisition.
Compass was engaged by the Arts Council project advisory group to design a data management lifecycle that is appropriate to the needs of the Arts Council and stakeholders and will ensure compliance with national data protection standards such as GDPR and international information security standards such as ISO 27001.
The main objective for the Arts Council was to develop their internal processes, and work with others to measure the effects of their investment, so as to understand the outcomes and impacts across a range of criteria. In addition to this, a primary objective is to provide benefits to funded Arts Organisations through the provision of data and reports that can support funding applications and lead to greater audience opportunities.
The solution provided is a multi-tenanted application, hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform that enables each contributing organisation to submit and view their own data securely and confidentially. The Arts Council also have their own unique view of the data and specific reporting functionality that supports national-level reporting.
The data is stored in an Azure SQL database. The data will be encrypted at rest and when in transit, with all communications over TLS. The solution utilises the benefits of MS Azure such as Web Jobs, Queues, Scheduled Tasks, Table Storage, Geo-Replication, Auditing and Threat detection. Application Insights and Monitoring are also employed to ensure that a robust, reliable, secure, performant, cost-effective and flexible solution is delivered.
