NW2676 - Stream Data Portal

Stream is a high profile, ambitious, sector-wide initiative with a mission to enable a scalable, repeatable approach to Open Data in Water.

Working as a collective comprised of 11 water companies and 5 partner organisations, Stream has already worked through a Blueprint phase to define the strategy and co-create an open data framework for the sector.

In early 2023 Stream was successful in securing further funding from the Ofwat Water Breakthrough Challenge Transform stream to support the Implementation phase and establish Stream as an operational open data platform for the water sector.

The implementation phase consists of an initial 10-month delivery stage to enable Stream to deliver both a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in December 2023 and 'Day-1' of the industrialised platform in Spring 2024.

Following the launch of the 'Day-1' platform, Stream will then focus on publishing additional open datasets to enable more complex use cases and develop additional user functionality. Stream will also develop a business plan to identify and develop new revenue models that will support the transition to a sustainable operating model after the current 2-year funding phase, hence the contract is 2 years (+2+1 years to extend; up to 5 years in total).

Stream aims to bring benefits to the water sector and beyond by establishing a widely accessible open data platform and associated governance and data standards, with a vision to unlock the potential of water data to benefit customers, society, and the environment.

As part of the implementation plan, there is a requirement to procure a data sharing platform capable of enabling the easy publication of data in both a centralised and decentralised manner as well as enabling data re-users to easily search, understand and access those datasets and share their findings to stimulate further innovation. By centralised we mean data uploaded to a central repository within the platform, while decentralised data will be data hosted by the individual companies, but still discoverable via the centralised search and data catalogue. We expect the centralised data to be mainly smaller volume, and less frequently updated, while more real time datasets are likely to follow the decentralised model. The platform must also enable both the sharing of fully open, public and shared data (as defined by the ODI Open Data Spectrum) and therefore will need to accommodate appropriate access controls under a range of licence types.

The data sharing platform shall form part of the scalable open data framework.

The platform will need to support the achievement of the following benefits across the water sector and beyond:

• Transparency with simpler regulation
• Collaboration becomes the default
• More engagement with stakeholders and innovators
• Simple experience for users, with a single interface
• Quicker to share innovation and best practice
• More efficient water companies and lower bills
• Improved data based decisions and better performance

The successful platform (solution) vendor shall have the following capabilities:

• Provide a robust project plan that demonstrates how an effective implementation can be achieved in a short timeframe (4-6 weeks)
• Provide a clear and realistic roadmap for the platform to demonstrate ongoing development and response to user feedback.
• Have a clear and easily understandable licence/pricing model that enables cost transparency and control by the client
• Ability to conform with the non-functional requirements
• Provide a good fit with the specified functional requirements with the minimum of customisation
• Demonstrate good client relationship management including robust support and maintenance arrangements
• Demonstrate how client lock-in is avoided by facilitating migration to another platform in the future
• Demonstrate a commitment to driving and facilitating the open data agenda and demonstrate experience of having successfully implemented similar with other clients