DAWN gives Nous clients data tools to drive action

DAWN gives Nous clients data tools to drive action

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Nous Group clients are benefitting from the insights derived from the Data Assets Warehouse for Nous (DAWN), a data warehouse that brings together proprietary data and public information to facilitate rapid analysis for consulting teams on projects.

Nous is using DAWN to work with clients to inform their actions on some of their biggest challenges.

We helped a university understand its actual and potential market share of students, organised by commuting distance from a proposed campus, and identified which disciplines should be its focus.

We helped a government agency to understand current and forecast supply and demand for skills in order to improve resource allocation to vocational education programs.

And we helped a state’s construction sector understand the paths taken by apprentices and trainees through the education and training system, and the relationship of skills supply and demand to industry growth and quality of work.

DAWN, which has been developed over two years by Nous’ Data & Analytics team, contains socio-economic and human capital data that provides rich insights into the labour market and the economy.

DAWN includes:

  • data on job advertisements and the relationship between field of education and advertised roles
  • data on higher education and Australian vocational education and training
  • historical employment data and Nous’ employment forecasts to 2023 by state, occupation and industry
  • Census data, including income, religion, education and socio-economic status by statistical area
  • business workforce profiles by gender and role
  • ASX200 companies’ performance data and social media posts.

Peter Ellis, Nous’ Chief Data Scientist, said DAWN gives Nous clients an edge in understanding emerging trends that will influence their operating environment.

“We have all seen the importance that timely and quality data has had in shaping the responses of governments around the world to COVID-19,” Peter said. “Data is coming to the forefront of decision-making in many fields.

“Buzzwords relating to machine learning and big data are common. But in our experience, clients first need an effective data pipeline, a good-quality data warehouse and sound approaches to statistical inference. When the time comes for big data, effective use depends on this solid foundation, which we see when we use large, non-traditional datasets or artificial intelligence tools.”

David Diviny, a Nous Group Principal, said DAWN showed the power of integrating data sets to solve policy challenges.

“DAWN is an expandable and flexible database platform populated with data that is ready for use. It brings together datasets together with a common data model, so as new data sets are added they are automatically linkable with other datasets in DAWN.

“All data sets in DAWN are cleaned and checked, so once they are stored they can be used multiple times. This means we can generate analysis rapidly, much more quickly than if we were starting from scratch.”

DAWN has been used in a range of projects across many sectors, enabling Nous to create interactive dashboards that allow users to explore new insights.

The Nous Recovery Monitor is a dashboard of real-time data that charts Australia’s progress through COVID-19. The Recovery Monitor, below, features data on industry impacts, employer demands, government procurement, business sentiment, online search patterns, and COVID-19 illness and fatalities. (The Nous Recovery Monitor was decommissioned in 2023.)

Screen grab of Nous recovery monitor data

The Nous Occupation, Skills and Education Map shows the distribution of skills, occupations and higher education across time and location. The map, below, can help to identify where people in a given occupation work, live and commute.

Maps of Sydney that show that show where key occupation work, live and commute

Organisations that want to discuss how DAWN can help them use data to inform their strategic decisions should contact us.

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