‘Release 1’ of the Observatory in January 2009 will include a ‘Report-Writer’ tool for partnership analysts. This will enable them to combine content from the Observatory with other materials and most importantly, to add their specialist interpretation and written commentary. These analysts will then be able to save their reports within the Observatory. In this way the Observatory will become much more than a self-service store of raw data but will begin to capture specific the knowledge and understanding of specialists across partnerships and to share this in an open and accessible way. It is intended that making online summary reports available in this way will reduce the burden on analyst of ad-hoc requests and thereby free up more of their time for more in-depth work and progress. The underlying data will of course remain be available to users of the Observatory for users who wish to explore it further and where necessary, download it for more in-depth analysis or to combine it with locally held data of their own.
Analysts time will also be saved by automating data transfer and where possible, automating calculation of performance indicators by the system itself.
