Agile Digital

Background

Australia has struggled to achieve impactful collaboration (“linkage”) between our industry and research sectors. CSIRO’s Data61 was tasked with helping to bring together innovators in Australian industry with academic researcher expertise. The goal being to boost linkage success rates by creating a smart search platform that could assist in facilitating researchers to connect with the right innovators in industry, and for industry to access specific subject matter expertise.

Agile Digital partnered with CSIRO/Data61 computer scientists to design, implement, and launch the Expert Connect online platform to bring together information Australian researcher expertise and make it easily discoverable.

Mission

Our goal was the collate large and disparate datasets that could constitute “signals of expertise” for Australian researchers. We then needed to apply an algorithm to create “expert profiles” for each researcher that could be searched for based on area of knowledge. The initial strategy was to:

• Acquire and ingest large publicly-available datasets on patents, Australian academics and scientific publications.
  
• Implement search functionality to cater to the nuance of academic quality naming conventions, ensuring accuracy and that incorrect references or citations didn’t happen as a result of using the platform conventions.
• Seamless integration was required between the experience layer and the search capability.
• Meet government web interface accessibility and security standards.
• Meet a tight time frame of three months for the initial platform design, development and launch.

Approach

In partnership with CSIRO, Agile Digital co-developed the Expert Connect and Innovation Challenge Connect platforms. Working in tandem with the Data61 team who focused on researcher profile creation, Agile Digital worked on the “big data” ingestion and search technologies. In additional to experiential layer and integrations with disparte data sources.

The platform was strategically designed with collaborative workshops, and the team kicked into development mode with a very tight 17-week deadline to meet the first launch deadline.

Agile Digital’s native cross-functional and collaborative approach ensured the deadline was met while allowing the Data61 team to really understand what could be achieved by aggregating and presenting a disparate range of data in an industry-friendly way.

Outcome

Agile Digital successfully partnered with Data61 to deliver the Expert Connect platform that enabled informed decision making on future development.

The deadline was met, with the initial beta featuring 45,000 researcher profiles and successfully launched by the then Assistant Minister Craig Laundy. Further development on the platform saw the number of researcher profile reach ~100,000.

The project received two category Merit Awards at the 2018 ACT iAwards:

• AIIA Infrastructure and Platforms Innovation of the Year.
• AIIA Public Sector and Government Award.