Unlocking Potential (U>P) – a powerful people analytics platform helping organisations of all sizes to optimise their workforce 

Background 

Nectis Ltd focuses on optimising wellbeing, performance and productivity in the workplace through people analytics and understanding business ecosystems.  Founder and CEO, Colin Campbell has a wealth of experience in this area, having spent more than 20 years building company ecosystems (the people related to your company). 

The Challenge 

Nectis Ltd successfully competed to deliver against CivTech 5, in 2021 with sponsor Transport Scotland.  Their Challenge – How can tech help foster the development of informal networks when people are working at home or in Work Local hubs? 

To assist in addressing the challenge and through the partnership between CivTech and Interface, Colin approached us to help facilitate collaboration with academia on three 3 different projects: 

• Data Visualisation 
• Business analysis of Serviceable Available Markets 
• Security and Anonymised Data Cloud Analysis 

The Solution 

The solution developed by Nectis Ltd is Unlocking Potential (U>P) Unlocking Potential – Optimising Business Agility & Performance, a SaaS people analytics platform that visualises patterns of collaboration and uses insight to create agility and wellbeing. This solution uses data driven insights of individuals and teams, to understand their patterns, overcome barriers and breakdown work silos.  In addition, it provides an evidence base for fair working practices, supporting positive working relationships. 

People analytics is a very powerful tool and up until now, the science behind it has been the reserve of researchers and programmers. 

Unlocking Potential (U>P) is a software tool that works by creating a digital model of a company ecosystem (the people related to any organisation) and then analysing it to deliver unique and powerful insights that can help achieve high levels of business agility and performance. 

To assist in addressing the challenge set by Transport Scotland Interface helped facilitate collaboration with academia on three 3 different projects: 

• Data Visualisation 
• Serviceable Available Market 
• Security and Anonymised Data Cloud Analysis 

The first related to Data Visualisation where a Data Science for Business MSc student at the University of Stirling undertook a project working with data that was already on the U>P platform and also tested data, to find ways to increase the rate at which data is added, through motivational feedback loops. This was achieved by identifying which forms of data design and delivery optimised insight creation for individual users to help them solve problems and/or take meaningful action.  

Beyond the initial contract with Transport Scotland, Nectis wanted to understand market potential and their initial B2B target market i.e. organisations with remote/complex workforces. Masters marketing students at the University of Glasgow carried out research to establish the serviceable available market for their offering and establish what Nectis could legitimately claim they could deliver on and how to articulate it to these customers.  Other student projects looked at innovation within Nectis’ pricing strategy and at finding ways to reward people for adding data that builds the aggregate picture, as well as, providing value for them individually. 

The third project relating to Security and Anonymised Data Cloud Analysis was as a result of a successful Advanced Innovation Voucher application and involved the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University.  This collaboration built on work already done by U>P with the aim of improving the levels of security in the application, focusing on the collection and processing of personal data, as well as, introducing advanced security measures to enable intelligent analysis of anonymised data.  

A key aspect of the work involved the use Big Data analysis methods in understanding the complex relationships involved in projects, roles, business relationships, behaviours, and so on, to determine good practice in achieving strong outputs, and thus more clearly identify how best to both understand the metrics to be gathered, but also in how to best define KPI (Key Performance Indicators). Understanding that the collection of data around business relationships requires to be kept private, Nectis wanted to develop privacy enhancing methods, which could be used to assess successful engagement, but respect privacy and consent. The collaboration with the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University with their strong background in cryptography, and other privacy related areas, along with their experience in building production ready systems was crucial to the success of this project.   

The Benefits 

The academic rigour awarded by the collaborations with academia have been good for the Nectis U>P brand and have resulted in Nectis achieving the following: 

• An SE SMART grant of £92K to continue the collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University as a result of the AIV scheme.  Total investment £160K 
• Accepted onto the UK Cyber Accelerator – one of only 3 Scottish companies to do so 
• Proof of concept for Scotland IS Cyber 
• Proof of concept for Scottish Government 
• Plan to raise £500K investment in forthcoming year 
• New patent application – Patent is for a distributed key system so individuals have a say in how their data is managed