What we do

We work across the whole life of a data initiative

Data initiatives need different kinds of work at different points: understanding the challenge, agreeing how data should be shared, designing standards, building reliable infrastructure, and making data easier to understand and use.

Our approach brings researchers, policy specialists, designers and engineers together around those problems — connecting strategic and technical decisions rather than treating them separately.

Tell us what you're working on

Research and strategy

We help organisations connect their data strategy to the change they want to make. That can mean reviewing an existing data programme, testing the case for a new initiative, developing a theory of change or outcomes framework, and understanding how it is expected to create value and impact.

We ground that work in evidence — through user research and stakeholder interviews, technical and data review, and research into the wider systems the initiative sits within. We can help assess what is feasible, what should be built or changed first, and how data can better support organisational or policy goals.

The result is a clearer route forward: what is worth building, funding or changing, how the initiative can be sustained, and how you will know whether it is working.

Governance and data sharing

When data is held across different organisations, the difficult part is often agreeing how sharing should work — what can be shared, by whom, for what purpose and under what conditions.

We design governance frameworks and data-sharing arrangements that make those decisions clear and usable in practice. That can include agreeing data-sharing principles, defining roles and responsibilities, developing data-sharing agreements, and bringing partners together to reach consensus. Where organisations need a shared view of progress, we also help develop shared indicators and measures.

This gives partners a practical basis for responsible data sharing: clear enough to support day-to-day decisions and built around a shared understanding of what matters.

Standards and tools

We design and maintain data standards — shared structures that help information move between teams, systems and organisations without everyone having to invent a different format.

We have particular expertise in developing open data standards, where information needs to work across whole sectors or ecosystems. That can mean designing data models and schemas, code lists and taxonomies, writing clear guidance, and building practical tools that make standards easier to implement — from spreadsheet templates to converters and validators.

We also help standards evolve over time, managing versions, extensions and migrations without making life harder for the people who use them.

Done well, this makes interoperability practical: organisations can produce and exchange consistent, machine-readable data, while publishers and users spend less time reconciling formats and fixing avoidable errors.

Data pipelines and platforms

Data needs to move reliably from where it is created to where it is used.

We build data platforms and pipelines that collect, transform and validate data, catching problems early. We build the APIs, data stores and registries that make that data available to other systems.

Increasingly, that includes making data usable by AI tools and agents — so people can find, query and work with it in new ways.

We also improve existing infrastructure: consolidating fragmented platforms, replacing ageing systems, and reworking services that have become slow, fragile or expensive to run.

This means less manual intervention, fewer failures, and a reliable foundation for new tools and services.

Analysis, learning and improvement

We help organisations understand what their data contains, how well it works, what it is being used for, and how to make it easier for people to explore.

We assess data quality and use across publishers and datasets, design indicators and categories, and develop repeatable ways to evaluate how data initiatives are working.

We also design dashboards, interactive maps and other ways to explore data — including interfaces that let people query complex datasets using natural language and AI tools.

This helps identify gaps in the data, understand which measures are useful, and decide where changes to the data or the way it is presented would make the most difference.

When we can help

You might be trying to:

More than one of these can be true at once.

We can work across them together, connecting decisions about the data, the systems around it and how it is shared and used.