Transcript
Transcript: Government of Canada Data Conference 2023: Innovation, Science And Economic Development Canada - Canada Digital Adoption Program - Developing An Innovative Data Model To Best Serve Canadians
The COVID-19 pandemic changed how Canadian businesses operate.
More Canadian businesses have gone online in the past two years than in the previous decade. And this shift to digital is here to stay.
It offers opportunities for prosperity. But it also poses challenges to Canada's small and medium-sized businesses at risk of being left behind, without access to funds and resources for their digital transformations.
Acting on this need, Innovation, Science and Economic Development, ISED, launched the Canada Digital Adoption Program, CDAP, in March 2022.
To enable robust data collection and deliver valuable insights supporting the program's implementation and delivery, the Program team worked with stakeholders to ensure departmental and other common data standards were applied.
Furthermore, we combined and refined data from multiple independent sources – including our client relationship management tool, our web metrics provider, and third-party reports--into a unified data model.
An automated data cleaning pipeline ingests, transforms and cleans raw data, storing it on a secure, cloud-hosted, database.
We leveraged a business intelligence application to develop a single data model, ensuring consistent data relationships and calculations across reports.
Documentation and interpretation guides are embedded in the data model alongside source code, allowing streamlined updates as the model evolves.
With the data model in place, we deliver self-service dashboards that answer key stakeholder questions.
Getting to this point was not always easy. We were among the first in the department to adopt cloud technologies for reporting purposes and best practices did not yet exist. Our experience shows that adopting interim reporting solutions to meet information needs, while developing novel approaches is possible and worthwhile.
The Canada Digital Adoption Program will continue to forge the way for Innovation, Science and Economic Development to increase its digital capacity with data analytics and dashboarding.
