Product Development Team 6 (PDT) - for the Analytical Community

D&A/DaaS have provisioned a combination of both raw and derived benefit data products, supporting both analytics and statistical publications for over 20 years.

A number of those products, including National Benefits Database (NBD) have been around for the whole of that time.

The AC/Client Stats have for a number of years identified the increasing technical debt, gaps and flaws within those products, and as a result have previously raised requests to address and/or modernise those products, which have not been ac-tioned/delivered.

The need for a better approach to servicing cross benefit data products is also seen in key user stories for consumers such as Citizen Event Store, RIS, Centric, ONS and others.

Business Problem: The technical debt and flaws in the NBD product, and especially the gaps in ena-bling the pipeline of new services to flow into it, i.e.

PIP, UC, GYSP etc, has forced multiple bespoke approaches to be taken across user communities to solve under-lying problems.

This both increases storage cost and develop/maintain resource consumption as well as leading to potential for inconsistency, and an overarching proliferation of data not compliant with GDPR.

There is poor knowledge of how NBD was built and the underlying business logic that drives how the data is shaped.

The engineering process is complex and inefficient, and therefore costly to simply update to address key gaps.

Please note: Initial work was for Discovery Phase, this work has now concluded and all documentation from that activity is available for review by the incoming G-Cloud company as it will form part of the work and potential solution that we want delivering in 2021/22.