What do you do at Involve?
My name is Mark and I am Business Intelligence Lead at Involve. Working in business intelligence necessitates an in-depth understanding of business applications and systems, data flows and processes, data analysis, and information presentation. Good business intelligence also requires building relationships with internal and external stakeholders to identify the most relevant pieces of information to support the delivery of a business objective. Strong working relationships ensure that information presented is accurate and relevant, and, ultimately, helps drive positive change. As Business Intelligence Lead, my aim is to ensure that Involve continues to deliver quality services underpinned by rich information assets.
Why did you leave your role within the NHS to join Involve?
I worked at Airedale NHS Foundation Trust as an Information Analyst and, latterly, Business Analyst for just over four and a half years after completing my doctorate in 2016. I supported the Trust’s innovative Digital Care Hub, which included its national care home telemedicine service, Immedicare: a joint venture with Involve. I supported numerous telemedicine projects and developed a wide range of skills in requirements generation, information processing and analysis. Having designed and delivered a number of information solutions at the Trust, I was ready to take on a new challenge and get engaged in projects outside of the NHS.
I continue to support the work of Immedicare at Involve, but now also contribute to many other exciting projects such as our collaboration with the Health Service Executive in Ireland. I am really enjoying the diversity of projects I can contribute to and the opportunities for future development at Involve.
Tell us how you got into business intelligence?
Working in business intelligence enables me to be a creative with precise and ‘scientific’ data; it is a natural progression from my scientific degree in informatics, artistic Master’s degree in social research, and doctorate in health services research and sociology. I like to be challenged and because business intelligence is evolving continually, with new tools for analysis and presentation enabling more sophisticated visualisations at scale, I feel like each day is always different and exciting.
How will business intelligence help Involve’s customers?
Business intelligence can help customers visualise activity and performance to identify areas of good practice but also areas of concern that require support. As well as activity, we can also help customers identify what impact our products and services have on the environment or how they save time or money.
You tweeted about working on some exciting things, tell us more?
We are developing some really nice visualisations of Attend Anywhere data as part of our collaboration with the Health Services Executive. Using Shape Maps in Power BI, we are able to present data geographically by county as well as using more traditional means such as bar and line charts. Using map visuals adds a completely new dimension to activity data that may otherwise be lost as you can compare uptake in the north, south, east or west of the country. This can be vital information operationally for deploying help and support, but also ensures that services offer the maximum benefit to their customers. Over time, we hope to add more mapping functionality to other products and services so that we an target support more strategically.
