City of Tampere

Human-centric services with the help of intelligent analytics

Advanced Family Analytics projects support the decision-making of the City of Tampere with more comprehensive data. The analysis model built by Gofore benefits families with children by helping to make services more human-centric.

CHALLENGE

Human-centric services require high-quality data

Typically, the implementation of public administration services has been production-centric. This solution may work fine from the point of view of the organisation producing the service; however, for individual residents of the municipality the situation can be challenging. During significant life events, such as a divorce, the resident undergoing the event and their family may have to interact with several different authorities.

An alternative solution is to produce services in a human-centric way, in which life events are taken into account as a whole already during the planning stage of services. However, this solution requires a comprehensive view on the lives and needs of the municipality’s residents. This kind of overall picture cannot be achieved by relying on statistical data used traditionally in decision-making. The issue has not gone unnoticed by Leena Viitasaari, who is the Planning Director of the third biggest municipality in Finland, Tampere.

We launched the Tampere Junior development programme in 2020 with the objective of reducing inequality for children and young people. Right from the start, we realised that we did not have enough information on families with children in order to carry out the most appropriate measures for reducing inequality. This was the start of our continued co-operation with Gofore.

Leena Viitasaari, Planning Director, City of Tampere

Illustration showing the more specific characteristics of different kinds of families within our population

OUR SOLUTION

Advanced analytics recognises the needs of families

In 2021, the City of Tampere carried out the Advanced Family Analytics project together with five other municipalities. In the project, a multi-faceted snapshot of families with children living in those municipalities was created with the help of analytics that utilised several different data sources.

A method developed by Gofore was used in the analysis. This method involved cluster analysis, expert know-how, artificial intelligence and ethical evaluation to produce data that municipalities can use in their decision-making. The data takes into account the different components that have an impact on the well-being of individual families together with their combined effects.

Pasi Lehtimäki, Lead AI Consultant, Gofore

RESULT

Decisions based on facts and better services

Comprehensive data on the needs of families with children helps Tampere to develop its services in a more human-centric direction, design its service system and allocate human resources according to service needs and areas.

“We have carried out three rounds of analysis with Gofore and a fourth one is being planned. After each round, we have been able to elevate our development work to a new level, and the interest within our organisation has grown. This does not only concern family services, the collaboration extends across sectors and involves, for example, land use planning and urban development,” Viitasaari says.

Viitasaari emphasises that the most important contribution of the co-operation has been the increased understanding on the diversity of families with children. Analysed data improves and accelerates the identification of different kinds of service needs and changes to those needs. Services can be planned and decisions can be made based on facts rather than guesswork. Viitasaari provides an example:

“During the summer, we hold park meal events with the goal of reaching families that need support. With the help of Gofore’s analytics, we know where the majority of the people who need support are and where we need to organise these meals. If the city receives inquiries about why meals were not arranged in a specific area, we can easily use data to explain our decisions.”

Knowledge management to support situational awareness

Project highlights

Objective

The City of Tampere required higher-quality data in order to produce human-centric services for families with children and to better target these services.

Approach and work

The advanced analysis model developed by Gofore utilises several different data sources and produces data on families with children that takes the different components of well-being into account along with their combined effects.

End result

The City of Tampere has a more multi-faceted and detailed overview of the different situations and needs of families with children. Services are now planned based on facts and with a human-centric approach. This method of modelling can be applied to other population groups as well.

Important figures

27,5k families with children reside in Tampere
11 different registry sources were combined in the analysis
3 completed rounds of analysis in the project for the City of Tampere
6 Finnish municipalities participated in the original project
80k families with children included in the well-being snapshot in the original project