Business Intelligence for Wage Inspectorate Victoria 

Wage Inspectorate Victoria (WIV), a Statutory Authority, is dedicated to creating productive and prosperous workplaces in Victoria, ensuring fair conditions for workers and a level playing field for businesses. Achieving this vision requires effective oversight across various operations, presenting challenges in accessing operational and case management data. WIV needed a comprehensive and integrated Business Intelligence (BI) solution to address these challenges, encompassing enhanced reporting capabilities and a scalable platform for data hosting and supply. In collaboration with Exco Partners, WIV embarked on an implementation journey utilizing Azure Data Platform to meet their existing and emerging requirements.

Our approach

To ensure the successful implementation of the Business Intelligence solution, our project followed our Insight-to-action approach, encompassing the following key steps:

Discovery: Using HCD design methods, Exco Partners facilitated service design workshops to thoroughly understand WIV’s daily operations, applications, data capture methods, existing reporting mechanisms, and other necessary information. These workshops involved engaging stakeholders and subject matter experts in discussions to identify specific insights and making a deliberate connection to the actions required. To establish a common understanding and align expectations, mock-ups were developed to visualize and validate potential dashboards with stakeholders, reducing testing iterations and improving project efficiency.

Design: Considering factors such as available technology options, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and end-user skills, Exco Partners provided recommendations for the platform hosting WIV’s BI use-case. Several solution design options were presented, showcasing potential approaches to address WIV’s requirements. Ultimately, Azure blob storage was chosen as the primary data collection mechanism, enabling seamless data processing and storage through the orchestration capabilities of Azure Data Factory.

Process: Since operational data was not readily accessible, Exco Partners collaborated with a third-party entity to obtain the necessary data and data dictionary. Data ingestion logic was developed to transfer the acquired data onto Azure blob storage, enabling efficient movement from the source to a centralized location for further processing.

Transform: A dataflow was created to transform and persist the ingested data into a Data Warehouse. This critical step involved comprehensive data cleansing, formatting, and structuring to ensure data consistency and accuracy, thereby laying a solid foundation for reliable analysis.

Visualise: Using Power BI, Exco Partners developed reports aligned with the previously developed mock-ups. These reports provided comprehensive insights into wage theft, long service leave, child employment, and other relevant entities, surpassing standard reporting capabilities. The aim was to empower the WIV team with actionable insights that would facilitate informed decision-making.