Dashboards have been quite a topic of contention in certain circles with the recent recirculation of Taylor Brownlow’s essay ”Are Dashboards Dead?”.

While I’m of the opinion that no, dashboards are not dead, they have been undeniably overused and often misunderstood, with a disconnect between a dashboard’s actual function versus our perceived function of them. 

Why is there dashboard fatigue?

Many of us have experienced dashboard fatigue, and rightfully so. As businesses, how many dashboards have we commissioned that were never fully utilised, if used at all? The answer is too many.

The reason for low engagement isn’t the fault of the humble dashboard, but rather that a dashboard was never the appropriate solution for the end user, or its design wasn’t tailored enough to the business use case.  

When faced with a business problem requiring data insights, we often jump straight to dashboard creation. However, there are many other solutions that can be tailored to deliver data insights, such as concise reports and static presentations. With an increased understanding of where dashboards fail, the conversation has shifted to questioning their relevance altogether.  

So, what place do dashboards still have in businesses, and how can we better understand where they excel to drive improved outcomes? 

What potential challenges may arise with dashboards?

There are many instances where dashboards may be less effective or complicate matters for businesses, and other methods provide a better solution. Instances may include: 

• When the user needs a concise answer to a question:
  Dashboards require interaction and exploration, which can be time-consuming. If a stakeholder needs a straightforward answer, a tailored report is more efficient.  
• For business specific, niche questions:
  Not every level of enquiry warrants the resource-intensive creation of a dashboard. For narrow, targeted questions, simpler reporting methods suffice. 
• One-time insights:
  Dashboards are overkill for static data projects, such as measuring the success of a single transformation. In these cases, producing a well-crafted report or presentation is more resource-efficient. 
• If the data is exported for analysis:
  If users regularly export dashboard data to manipulate it elsewhere, it’s a sign that the dashboard doesn’t meet their needs or wasn’t necessary to begin with. 

When might dashboards be the right solution?

Company-wide reporting platforms

Dashboards provide a unified view of performance across teams, offering consistent delivery of insights to aiding faster decision making, customisable filters for views specific to each business unit, efficiency in distributing insights without the need for manual reporting and increased data accessibility through data visualisation. 

Regular cadence reporting

For tracking ongoing metrics such as daily sales, customer trends or campaign performance, and measuring progress against targets, dashboards provide updated insights without the wait. 

Exploratory analysis

Whenusers want to discover patterns, relationships or unknown trends within the data, dashboards allow for interactive interrogation. These tools are especially valuable for data-savvy end users, enabling self-service exploration without requiring an analyst’s intervention. 

Monitoring ongoing initiatives

Dashboards are excellent for tracking live projects or recurring business processes, offering real-time visibility into performance. 

The future approach for dashboards

With the above in mind, we’re moving to a more informed approach where dashboards are no longer a tiresome, default solution, but a carefully considered tool.

The future isn’t about abandoning dashboards, but about being intentional and strategic in their creation and deployment. The key is facilitating dashboard creation in a way that adds tangible value and is thoughtfully configured to provide meaningful, actionable insights that empower decision making. 

How CACI can help

At CACI, we work with you to deliver the best solutions for your analysis needs. Our extensive experience in successfully implementing dashboards across diverse industries highlights several key scenarios where dashboards have proven to be highly effective.  

Whether it’s creating a bespoke, one-off report or developing a suite of comprehensive, customisable dashboards, contact us to find out more about how our user centric approach and industry expertise can help you gain meaningful analytics that will drive strategic business outcomes. 

Setting the stage for AI and CRMs

The field of Machine learning and AI has evolved rapidly in the last few years, especially in fields where large quantities of data and quick response times to queries are crucial.

But given lots of these techniques and methods have been around for a much longer period, why has it taken so long for other industries outside of small start-ups and ambitious tech giants to leverage these methods in similar ways? 

CRM is an essential component of any company’s strategy. The ability to communicate with and understand customers is more important than ever due to the low barriers to entry in highly competitive global markets. Companies have only brief moments to convince customers that they are the right choice for shopping, spending time, or engaging. Optimising these initial and subsequent contacts is paramount to success. 

Beyond just expanding your customer base and attracting new clients, CRM is vital for any company’s retention strategy. The most advanced cutting-edge models in the world are utterly useless if we don’t know how to activate and capitalize on the value they represent. 

ML foundation for CRMs

In the CRM space our main goals are increasing consumer retention or spend, and we do this via figuring out the most effective ways to communicate with people. This can be broken down into when to speak to them, how to speak to them and why to speak to them.  

Recommendation engines lie at the core of many of these architectures, models that are designed to figure out what you want before you even know you want it. Broadly they work by looking at the kind of customer you are, then at customers like you, then finding things that they’ve bought recently that you haven’t.  

You can even simplify this down into just looking for customers who have an identical purchase history to you. Maybe a laptop you can buy on Amazon doesn’t come with a charger, so commonly when people buy this laptop their next purchase is a charger (You can often see this simple logic in the “People also bought” section of Amazon). But even these simple implementations are incredibly powerful in some ways, an educated guess is always going to be better than a random one. 

So how do these methods relate to CRM? Well, the general structure can be pulled away and applied to any subject.

When we think about how to engage with a customer, we’re going to look for ways we engaged with similar customers and how these performed. The customer who likes Sabrina Carpenter will probably need to be spoken to in a different way to the Motorhead fan. 

This is simple stuff, right? Well exactly, but it’s a method to show that the underlying AI processes in these platforms aren’t really all that complicated – there’s a lot of room for improvement especially when implementing bespoke solutions with larger data sets.  

The next (generative) step  

So, we already have ML methods that can tell us when and why to talk to people, great! But what’s the next step? 

All that’s left of our final stage is how to talk to them and what to say, stages which can and are currently being revolutionised by the advent of enterprise grade Generative AI. 

A current pipeline for devising CRM processes may involve creating template communications that are then populated with more specific information, for example customers in a certain segment defined by age and tenure are assigned one template and differing segments are shown another. 

This approach can be time consuming if it needs to be completed for each campaign, and may miss a level of personalisation that people will respond to, feeling as though each message is tailored to them rather than being an email blast they just happen to be caught up in. 

Skilled AI engineers armed with LLM’s can create a unique voice for each consumer, ensuring that quite literally all communication they will ever receive are exactly personalised to them and their engagement habits with your brand. 

Imagine attempting this even a few years ago, assigning a team of people to trawl through millions if not billions of rows of data to ensure that each customer got the perfect messaging for them would have been completely impossible. 

In practice this level of granularity in communications is probably unnecessary but it speaks to the potential these models have in this space – the sky truly is the limit. 

Even starting off small with these steps, giving a small part of a communication a generative component, allowing for large scale A/B testing and continuous model training, the effectiveness of these comms will improve over time. 

Freeing this time up from your CRM team will give them more time to tackle more involved problems that can’t be automated. 

If you need help on this journey for a better CRM, contact us here.

At a time when budgets are under so much pressure, facilitating Home to School Transport (HTST) efficiently has never been more important. Millions of pounds are being unnecessarily spent on passenger transportation, with limited efficiencies or cost-cutting initiatives in place through a lack of supporting technology or tools.

With spiralling costs, tightened budgets and limited capacity, local authorities are struggling to delivery their statutory obligations. So, what can be done to save costs while optimising HTST capabilities?

Most substantial challenges local authorities face with Home to School Transport (HTST)

• SEND costs are set to triple to £1.125 billion over the course of a decade, according to the Isos Partnership for the County Council’s Network 
• Havering Council is spending £6.5m per annum on transporting 420 pupils, resulting in £2,500 per pupil 
• Birmingham City Council is currently spending £19.4 million on transporting vulnerable children to school  
• Norfolk County Council is spending £40m to arrange buses/taxis for 4,100 children with extra requirements, or more than £9,700 per child. 

Local governments must find ways to:  

• Efficiently plan routes buses to minimise contracts and private taxis
• Deliver safe and reliable service to pupils
• Ensure safeguards are in place to protect vulnerable pupils
• Establish communication with parents, schools and councils
• Offset increasing council deficits through efficiency savings.

What CACI technology solutions can help local authorities overcome these challenges?

Pin Routes: Route planning & optimisation

As a next-generation route planning and optimisation software, Pin Routes helps local authorities plan and optimise routes for school transport. It is cloud-based, scalable software that features advanced algorithms and a state-of-the-art user interface, with functions including strategic analysis and static (periodic) and dynamic (daily) planning.

Pin Routes considers the individual needs of each child, special school requirements, vehicle capabilities, provider capacities and driver skillsets to help achieve lower costs and carbon emissions.

Pin Live: Live route management

This live route management software ensures all parties stay informed in real-time, giving parents and schools peace of mind with up-to-date information, keeping local authorities in control and simplifying the process for drivers and service providers.

Acorn: Consumer segmentation

CACI’s consumer segmentation tool, Acorn provides demographic, lifestyle and behavioural insights of pupils. Acorn unlocks detailed insights about families’ financial backgrounds which can be used to determine those pupil households who could contribute towards transportation costs.

Access to this data equips local authorities with additional capabilities to better assess pupils’ eligibility for school transport while at the same helping the Council to meet with its statutory obligations.

Longer-term benefits local authorities will enjoy with CACI’s data and technology solutions

Saving operational costs:

• Councils will have more time to effectively plan at a strategic level
• Vehicles can complete more tasks
• Pin Routes will ensure councils can undertake ‘what if’ analyses for future scenarios to uncover and implement strategic efficiencies
• Inputs can be scaled up and higher volumes of transport can be supported each year.

Improve efficiencies: 

• Planners and schedulers can prioritise journeys quickly, effectively and on a regular basis
• Transport providers can take the most effective routes between homes and schools to save on fuel, mileage and drivers’ hours
• New tasks can be imported as they are booked and teams can pick these up as part of their existing plans, ensuring the right tasks will be prioritised.

Improve ESG and resident-centric operations: 

• Councils can be confident in delivering a consistent service to residents
• Journeys will be made efficiently, reducing the spend on fuel and vehicle maintenance. Monthly cuts in CO2 emissions will also be recognised.
• Enhanced scheduling and routing will increase driver and resident satisfaction as journeys are prioritised and optimised.

CACI is already a trusted data partner to the public sector and has a proven track record of delivering cost-effective, sustainable logistics solutions to organisations within the private sector.

Whether through our innovative software and communication technology like Pin Routes, Pin Live and Acorn, our expert consulting services or our innate public sector knowledge and experience, we are committed to supporting your organisation in achieving its goals.

For further information on how CACI can help transform your route optimisation operations, please register here.

Key issues for countries and the businesses that operate within them to address in terms of climate change unfolded at the recent 28^th UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). These issues urge immediate and significant action to be taken on fossil fuels and clean energy, national adaptation and climate finance, methane reduction, land use and more.

What does environmental sustainability in business mean?

Environmental sustainability in business is the operation of a business that does not compromise the environment. A business that has considered environmental sustainability prioritises the environment’s best interest, with society and its ecosystems coming before making a profit. It involves responsible decision-making that minimizes carbon footprint or waste while simultaneously improving the quality of life for humankind and the natural world alike.

Unfortunately, however, operating businesses as usual has had an increasingly detrimental impact on our planet. According to the latest State of the Global Climate report by the WMO, 2023 was the warmest year on record at about 1.4C,increasing pressure to shift their operations to more environmentally sustainable practices. This inevitably causes businesses to consider—where do we start? How do we begin making a difference?

What is the importance of environmental sustainability in business?

According to an article published by Maryville University, businesses that do not act responsibly will result in “the majority of many species not surviving past the 21st century”, reiterating how critical it is for businesses within every industry to take part in improving their environmental surroundings.

Although companies have a way to go before fully grasping the repercussions of ever-growing carbon footprints, those willing to tackle this challenge early on will get a head start on reshaping perspectives and realities.

Environmental sustainability in business practices

Businesses can rely on the three R’s– reduce, reuse and recycle– to begin reducing their environmental impact. However, there are several other examples of practices that businesses can incorporate into their operations amplify their reduction, including:

• Life cycle assessments
• Designing environmentally friendly products/services
• Optimising product efficiency
• Decreasing supply chain carbon footprint
• Re-evaluating CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) expenses

Benefits of environmental sustainability in business

Reduces the impact of business costs

While the cost-of-living crisis is skyrocketing, improving the energy efficiency of business operations and decreasing waste will go a long a way in bracing for the impact of unexpected business costs. Using more energy efficient lighting or reusing existing resources can be quick-fix solutions for lowering costs.

Improves a business’ reputation

Environmentally sustainable businesses are viewed as a plus, and companies are eager to highlight this fact. Companies that can go “green” show that they’re serious about making a difference in the environment and are interested in more than just profitability. Businesses that can market themselves and develop their identity around their commitment to the betterment of the planet will notice incredible results in terms of their reputation.

Who is responsible for improving environmental sustainability in a business?

Businesses have been expected to pave the way towards environmental sustainability due to their notably significant contribution towards polluting the environment through waste, gas emissions and plastics generated. The responsibility does not necessarily begin with one individual within a business though– employees at every level of the business must work together to bring about change. A few examples include:

• Business owners and leaders: Business owners and leaders are typically capable of leading strategic decision-making that influences the wider business. They can develop effective sustainability strategies and initiatives that have the power to change policy and induce change.
• Business managers and supervisors: Managers and supervisors can supply valuable insights due to their more hands-on roles. They also typically have different perspectives and understandings as to how to improve business sustainability.
• Employees: Employees can supply valuable contributions when encouraged to voice their opinions and concerns on how the business can become more sustainable.

Impact of environmental sustainability in business

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is striving to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It’s going to take strong leadership, business-wide alignment on operations and an engaged corporate culture to successfully execute and maintain environmentally sustainable business practices. Businesses that start addressing these issues and challenge existing business processes will find themselves making a breakthrough towards becoming more environmentally sustainable while protecting the world around them.

How can CACI help you overcome these obstacles?

Our newly developed Mood Environmental Hub helps track all of your assets across multiple geographic locations and assess the environmental impact of your business.

With a single click, users can drill down from multi-site, business-level functions, to departments or even individual teams to determine asset types and locations, enabling a quick assessment of priority focus areas for improvement. It can also visualise existing data through user-friendly dashboards that show carbon impact, consumption and cost at an enterprise level.

The advanced modelling feature also outlines potential improvements, indicating ROI and carbon reduction impact. Additionally, you can easily check performance against carbon commitments such as Social Value through the initiatives tracker.

Producing carbon reduction target tracking reports or modelling for a business case is now a click away – to see how it works, you can book a demo here.

When an admissions authority receives more applications for a school than it has spaces available, it must order the provision of places according to its oversubscription criteria. These rules can be bespoke to each admissions authority. The criteria must be transparent and easy to understand, with a public outlining of the criteria available. So, how can this process be handled fairly and transparently?

Admissions arrangements must be in line with the School Admissions Code. “The purpose of this code is to ensure that all school places for maintained schools and academies are allocated and offered in an open and fair way.” The code has the force of law.

Exceptions to oversubscription criteria

There are exceptions to whom oversubscription criteria do not apply. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who have an education health and care plan (EHCP) which specifically names a school, must be offered a place.

Once they have been offered a place, the highest priority must then be given to looked after children and previously looked after children.

Having a record of any EHCP or child looked after status in the authority’s system already makes it easy for admissions teams to validate the status of such an application. A joined-up approach is essential for handling applications fairly and transparently. A robust evidence base also makes handling appeals much easier.

Once EHCPs and children looked after have been allocated places, the rest of the applicants must be sorted through. In the easiest case scenario, there will be fewer applications than there are available place and, simply, they must all be offered a place.

Setting out your oversubscription criteria

Every admissions authority must set out its arrangements against which school places are allocated in the event of oversubscription. Each authority can define and order the criteria in their own way. There is no prescribed ordering of criteria, or even which criteria must be included.

The following is an inexhaustive and unindicative list of oversubscription criteria:

• Siblings: It may sound obvious, but the authority must outline its interpretation of the term ‘sibling’. This is to cover step-siblings and adoptions. Linking family records in a central system makes defining and implementing the interpretation straightforward.
• Catchment area: These must be designed by the authority to be reasonable and clearly defined. Linking this to digital mapping solutions can further help define a catchment in a system by considering factors such walking time to a school.
• Feeder schools: These must be nominated by the authority and clearly defined. Linking records in a central system helps determine this, since obtaining current school attended information is easy.
• Social and medical records: Authorities must clearly set out how social and medical records will be used in this context. Enabling parents to submit any records as part of their initial application makes the process easier for everyone.
• Ability or aptitude: Any such requirements must be publicly available. Only grammar schools can base their entire intake based upon this.
• Faith schools: Enabling parents to submit supporting documentation at the point of application makes determining this much easier for everyone. Where faith schools are undersubscribed, places must be offered to all applicants regardless of faith.
• Children of staff: The School Admissions Code states that this applies to children of staff who have been working at the school for two or more years, or where the staff member has been recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. Linking records again helps to make determining this easier.

Conclusion

Oversubscription criteria are essential to a fair and transparent admissions process. Where places are appealed, a robust set of protocols also helps to argue the admission authority’s decisions.

It is also a process that can be automated. Where complete information on a child is held in an authority’s education management information system, all relevant information can be submitted by parents, schools and professionals, recorded against the child and considered when oversubscriptions criteria are called upon in the school admissions process.

This makes collecting evidence for appeals much more straightforward. No more manually trawling through records, aspects such as catchment areas can simply be called upon and put forward to an appeals panel.

It also makes determining admissions based on the bespoke criteria of the admissions authority much easier. To use catchment area as an example again, linking to mapping tools makes determining distance from a school incredibly straightforward. The decision can then be logged in the central system, with no need to resort to spreadsheets and physical copies of children’s records and the outcomes of their admissions.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

This is a topic that we’ve covered in greater detail, examining the entire admissions process, in our recent white paper, A fair school admissions process for all. You can download a free copy here.

Elective home education (EHE) has been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. A recent report by Schools Week suggests that elective home education has risen by 60% since the pandemic. Up to 125,000 children now educated in this way.

There are obvious safeguarding issues for local authorities to follow up on, from children missing education to ensuring that those children who are being home educated are in a safe environment and receiving an appropriate education.

There are significant barriers to this for local authorities, however, not least in the form of there being no legal requirement for parents to inform local authorities that they are educating their child(ren) at home. So how can the challenge of monitoring these children be met?

This challenge is particularly acute for children who simply never enter full time education. Where a child was previously attending a school prior to receiving elective home education, schools have a duty to inform local authorities of their deletion from the school roll. A joined-up data approach is essential in order that correct and robust oversight is available.

As the Schools Week report highlights, however, growing numbers of elective home education pupils will inevitably result in a greater strain on local authorities in relation to monitoring and safeguarding.

With more children to keep tabs on not being met with a similar increase in the number of available resources, it is vital that authorities find the most effective and efficient route to fulfilling their obligations.

How can authorities monitor elective home education students?

Data sharing is one obvious area in which authorities can help themselves and each other. Having a technology ecosystem in place that facilitates data capture from schools, local authorities, parents and any other professionals involved in a child’s educational journey plays a significant role in creating the transparency required for local authorities to act.

The background context for each elective home education child is another aspect that helps local authorities. If a child is known to local youth justice services, has identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England – additional learning needs (ALN) in Wales – or has previously been excluded from school, then there are areas around safeguarding and appropriate provision of education to them.

This ties into the emerging area of trauma-informed practice when it comes to dealing with children and young people across the education and youth justice sectors. Put simply, context is vital, yet can only be factored in with a joined-up approach is adopted.

Of course, none of that is to say that every elective home education child has safeguarding concerns around them. Many parents and families opt for elective home education for myriad reasons and do a perfectly good job of educating their children. It is still important, however, that is satisfied in the eyes of the local authority.

Fulfilling obligations to elective home education students

So, how can local authorities fulfil their obligations for elective home education children? Making the capture of relevant data as easy as possible is the first step.

• If a child is taken off the register at the school, the school has an obligation to inform the local authority. How is this data received by the appropriate personnel at the authority?
• Once visits are scheduled to families, how are the outcomes of such visits recorded within the authority?
• If a child moves into or out of a local authority, how is that data received or shared with their next authority?

Technology is at the forefront of this. Removing the need to manually trawl through records makes the process far more efficient. If practitioners can easily access full case records, they can pick up and understand a child’s journey quickly. They can then record the outcomes of their own work against a child’s record. This maintains a single thread of information relevant to the child.

Using Modular Education Management Information Systems

Portals can play a significant role, too. For example, IMPULSE from CACI is a modular system which features school, parent, provider and professional portals. Each touchpoint with the child has the ability to record relevant information which is then stored against a single record. This helps to maintain a holistic view of every child, with relevant data being made available to relevant parties.

In the case of elective home education children, local authorities being notified instantly when a child is taken off register or excluded will trigger the appropriate follow up activities for the relevant personnel.

Ultimately, treating each family and child fairly and transparently is paramount. Every child has a right to access education, ensuring that families are appropriately providing this ultimately falls to the local authority.

The tools exist to make this process more effective and efficient for everyone. Our data sheet takes a closer look at elective home education, what local authorities need to do inline with the Education Act and how they can best support children and families.