The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has signed for a one-year partnership with data tech company Aiimi to build a grants data management system.
It will initially be used for the Covid-19 business support grant and Green Homes Grant, and has been built to be customisable to the needs of other grant schemes.
The £900,000 contract for the initiative was signed in December and the first deployments are scheduled for next month.
A BEIS team has been working with Aiimi to develop the systems on Microsoft Azure and Databricks technologies to systematically capture, ingest, prepare and enrich the relevant data for an end-to-end process in managing the grants. It is being build to Government Digital Service standards.
Information will be held within a data lake for use by data scientists, analysts and statististicans.
Gavin Dollin, product sponsor and head of data services at BEIS, said: “The data management system at BEIS lays the foundations for a great data service. It brings together tech from Microsoft Azure and Databricks to create a platform that not only supports our current needs but will change and grow to match our ever-evolving data journey.”
The Covid-19 business support grants are aimed at helping businesses get back on their feet from the lockdown by supplying loans, tax relief, cash grants, financial support, and trading grants; and the Green Homes Grant offers financial contributions to residential property owners towards the cost of insulation, low carbon heating and draft proofing.
Image from iStock, Vadzim Kushniarou
