Projects

2Paths Solution Brief
Customer: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Industry: International Development
Location: Paris, France
Solution: Custom web application for statistical inquiry

Challenge:

The OECD collects comparable statistics on international development from the 23 members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), as well as multilateral organizations and non-DAC donors.   The data from these donors are published and provided to the world through the OECD.Stat web portal. The data are complex and stored in 2 databases (one on aid aggregates and one on individual aid activities) and difficult to navigate for people unfamiliar with the structure of the databases.  Many users ended up contacting the OECD to find the information for them, or asking the OECD to validate that they did, in fact, have the correct information.

Solution

2Paths worked with OECD’s internal team to develop an intuitive, intelligent, and flexible web application that allows users to find the information they need without having to know the internals of how the OECD stores its data.

Results

Better, intuitive access to information supports the OECD’s mandate to provide aid-flow statistics, and will result in fewer requests for information that require the intervention of an OECD team member, saving time and money.

“Our mandate is to provide  statistics on aid flows – where, who, how, for what purpose, when -  information for improved global development. The new system increases access to our data and makes it easier for people to find what they need in a far more user-friendly manner than ever before.”

–Yasmin Ahmad, Manager of the DAC Data Collections Unit on  Development Statistics

2Paths Helps OECD Provide Improved Access to Vital Statistics

THE ORGANIZATION

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy to:

•    Support sustainable economic growth
•    Boost employment
•    Raise living standards
•    Maintain financial stability
•    Assist other countries’ economic development
•    Contribute to growth in world trade

The OECD is one of the world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data. As well as collecting data, OECD monitors trends, analyses and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more. OECD provides information by which governments can compare policy, seek answers to common problems, identify best practices, and coordinate domestic and international policies.

THE CHALLENGE

Every year, OECD’s Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD) Statistics Division gathers detailed data on development statistics from its 23 members as well as other donor countries and multilateral organizations, like the United Nations and World Bank. The DCD maintains two databases – one with annual aggregates and the other with individual aid activities i.e. details on individual  aid activities. .  The data are gathered by recipient country, and by sector, including agricultural, health, and education.  The OECD’s mandate is to provide these statistics on aid flows  – information like where, who, how, for what purpose, and when – to researchers, academics, aid practitioners in government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as to journalists and institutional writers.  Users access this information via the OECD web portal OECD.Stat. However, retrieval of the data may be cumbersome for “non expert users” due a complex data structure.

Making Aid Transparency Possible

Funding organizations use the information stored in the databases to see how aid has been spent and whether donors have met their targets.  The OECD.stat, provides access to accredited users through a web browser interface. “The idea behind OECD.Stat was to make the information we collect more broadly accessible to organizations and individuals,” said Yasmin Ahmad, Manager of the DAC Data Collections Unit on Development Statistics, OECD.

Ahmad added, “the way OECD.Stat is structured, based on underlying complex tables, means the general public did not understand intuitively how to get what they needed from the system. OECD is one of the world’s largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy. Our own in-house researchers produce OECD’s many insightful reports; they understand the way the data is structured and can navigate to find the information they need. However, this same detailed knowledge of what we collect and where it is stored is not ingrained in most outside users, and we knew that was limiting our ability to provide easy access to aid statistics.”

THE SOLUTION

Thanks to funding from a large foundation, the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate worked with 2Paths to develop a new web application that would allow people with no understanding of the data structure to derive the information they needed. “We met with 2Paths through the Foundation, which had worked with them on a project for a United Nations Agency,” said Marc Tocatlian, Information Technology Unit Leader for the Statistics Division of the OECD’s Development Cooperation Directorate. “We rapidly built a project team consisting of IT and statistics experts from OECD, technical development and user interface leads from 2Paths and a business analyst from the sponsoring foundation,” said Tocatlian.  One of the OECD’s main concerns was to meet the basic needs without adding a lot of workload to existing staff. “We had two technology requirements for the new query wizard,” said Tocatlian. “One, we did not want to reinvent the wheel; we needed to develop a system that would use the existing technical platform. Two, we wanted the system to be easily adaptable to other OECD datasets so that if successful, colleagues could use the same technology to further improve and expose complex datasets as well.”

Learning About Agile Development and User-centered Design

First, 2Paths taught the entire team the principles and practices of Agile technology development so that everyone had a common understanding of the process they were entering. Then, several weeks were spent discovering the OECD’s business requirements. Upon completion of the initial discovery phase, 2Paths brought in one of their partners, DesignStamp, who helped to develop five user-personas by interviewing a cross-section of actual users. In the end, the team created: Michael, a journalist from the Economist, Michelle, a government policy maker, Jennifer, an undergrad, general journalist, Sophie, an OECD staff member, and Bruno, a layperson unfamiliar with the OECD and its data structures.

“The personas really helped us to keep the project on track. If a team member or developer came up with an idea for functionality that users in our personas did not need, or did not meet the OECD’s vision, we would not entertain it,” said Aaron Gladders, president of 2Paths. “The personas meant we were able to develop a common method of validating necessary functionality and apply budget in the most cost-effective way.”

After the initial scoping and budget phase the 2Paths technical team engineered a new web portal called the Query Wizard for International Development Statistics or “QWIDS.” QWIDS sits on top of the existing OECD.Stat infrastructure and allows users to navigate through the OECD’s data, hiding the complexity of the underlying data.  Total project time was one year from discovery to the production launch.

THE REWARDS

Ahmad believes the new system really supports the organizations’ mandate to provide aid flow statistics, and operationally, it will reduce the number of requests for information to her office. “Our objective is to provide people with the statistics they need quickly and easily” said Ahmad.

New Flexibility and Stability Improves User Experience
“The way the new interface leads people through a search; it provides guidance and yet flexibility at the same time – flexibility which the current system simply could not handle,” said Ahmad. “Even our in-house users are thankful for the new easy-to-use query interface.”

“The system takes advantage of the existing platform as specified and could be adapted to other OECD databases. Thanks to 2Paths for bringing their Agile development philosophy to the table; their pragmatic approach, focus and ability to bring in the right expertise at the right time, allowed us to develop in a shorter time period than if we had been doing the work ourselves” said Tocatlian.