Skip to main content

This is a prototype vision of how a future government service could work. It's not a real service yet, but we're exploring what it could look like. Your feedback will help shape the real service.

Walkthrough Complete - QuickSight Dashboard

You’ve completed the QuickSight Dashboard walkthrough

Walkthrough complete

You've experienced self-service analytics with Amazon QuickSight

Congratulations! In just 10 minutes, you've seen how self-service analytics empowers officers to answer operational questions without IT dependency. What would have taken weeks to pilot, you've experienced hands-on right now.

Sandbox vs Production Architecture

This sandbox demo uses Chart.js with Lambda-generated sample data (£0.00/month) to demonstrate self-service analytics concepts without licensing costs.

Production deployment would use Amazon QuickSight with:

  • QuickSight Reader users - £18/user/month for dashboard viewing, filtering, and export
  • QuickSight Author users - £24/user/month for creating/editing dashboards (1-2 per council)
  • SPICE in-memory caching - 10 GB free tier, enables sub-second queries over millions of rows
  • Athena serverless SQL - £5/TB scanned (typically £2-5/month for council data)
  • Glue Data Catalog - Auto-discovers CSV schema, free tier covers council usage
  • Embedded dashboards - Integrate into council intranet via iframe
  • ML Insights - Automatic anomaly detection and forecasting

Typical production cost: £200-400/month for 10-20 users with real-time analytics

What you've learned

Real-time data exploration

You filtered 5 months of service data by date range, service type, and ward with instant results. No waiting for IT to create Excel reports - answers in seconds, not days.

Value: 3-7 day lag eliminated → same-day decision-making

Interactive drill-down

You clicked charts to drill into underlying data, sorted tables by any column, and explored multi-dimensional patterns. Officers can follow their curiosity without submitting IT tickets.

Value: Unlimited exploration vs static Excel reports

30-second committee reporting

You exported the dashboard to PDF in 30 seconds. This replaces 4.5 hours of analyst time creating PowerPoint slides from multiple Excel files. 90x faster committee paper preparation.

Value: 4.5 hours → 3 minutes per committee report

80% IT dependency reduction

Self-service analytics reduces ad-hoc IT report requests by 80%, freeing 384 hours annually for strategic projects. IT shifts from repetitive reporting to digital transformation.

Value: £13,440/year IT time savings + strategic focus

Committee-ready talking points

Use these points when presenting to decision-makers:

The problem

"Officers currently submit tickets to IT for ad-hoc reports, waiting 3-7 days for Excel spreadsheets. With 20 ad-hoc requests per month, IT spends 480 hours annually on repetitive reporting instead of strategic transformation projects. Data analysts spend 4 hours per week creating weekly service manager reports. This creates decision lag - service managers make decisions on week-old data, not real-time insights."

The solution

"Amazon QuickSight provides self-service business intelligence dashboards accessible 24/7 via web browser. Officers apply filters, drill down into data, and export reports without IT involvement. Dashboard reflects latest service metrics (updated daily or hourly via automated S3 uploads). 80% of routine questions answered through self-service, leaving IT to handle only complex analysis requiring custom queries."

The value

"For 10 users, annual savings of £17,340 (analyst time + IT time) against £2,218 cost delivers 6.8:1 ROI with 1.5 month payback. Beyond financial savings: faster decision-making (same-day data vs week-old reports), data-driven culture (officers ask more questions when answers are instant), democratic transparency (councillors access same dashboard as officers), and IT strategic focus (384 hours freed for automation and digital services)."

The risk

"Low. Predictable £18/user/month pricing (Reader users). 2-month pilot with 5 users costs £450 to validate ROI and user adoption. Pre-built dashboards require no SQL skills - point-and-click filtering. CloudWatch billing alarms prevent unexpected costs. QuickSight connects to existing council data (CSV exports to S3) - no database migration required."

Next steps

Generate Evidence Pack

Create your business case with what you've learned. Perfect for committee papers.

Generate Evidence Pack

Return to QuickSight Dashboard

Review deployment options, costs, and technical details.

Back to scenario

Try Another

Explore more AI scenarios for local government.

Browse scenarios
Important Remember to clean up your AWS resources

Clean up your resources

Your QuickSight Dashboard resources will automatically delete after 2 hours, but you can delete them now to stop any further charges:

  1. Go to CloudFormation console
  2. Find your stack: ndx-try-quicksight-dashboard-[timestamp]
  3. Select the stack and click "Delete"
  4. Confirm deletion - this takes 3-5 minutes
  5. S3 bucket and QuickSight dashboard will be automatically removed

Estimated cost so far: £1.50 for a 10-minute evaluation (QuickSight Reader user + SPICE cache + Athena queries)

What if I want to test with more council data?

If you want to continue testing QuickSight:

  • Upload your own CSV files to the S3 bucket (check CloudFormation Resources tab for bucket name)
  • Run Glue crawler to create table schema from your CSV structure
  • Refresh QuickSight dataset to pull latest data from Athena
  • Cost: £18/user/month (Reader) + minimal Athena/S3 costs (~£5/month)
  • Test with real council service data (anonymize if using production data)

Production considerations

If you're considering deploying QuickSight for real council analytics:

Integrating with council systems

Data integration options:

  • CSV upload: Export from council systems, upload to S3 (manual or automated via script)
  • API integration: Lambda function calls council API, writes to S3 hourly/daily
  • Direct database connection: QuickSight connects to council database via VPC (real-time queries)
  • Data warehouse: QuickSight connects to existing Redshift/Snowflake data warehouse
Row-level security for ward managers

Row-level security (RLS) ensures each ward manager sees only their ward's data in shared dashboard:

  • Define RLS rules in dataset: map user email to ward field
  • Ward Manager A sees only "Central Ward" rows, Ward Manager B sees only "North Ward" rows
  • Councillors see ward-specific data for democratic oversight
  • Service managers see all wards for council-wide analysis
Cost optimization strategies

Keep QuickSight costs predictable:

  • Use Reader users (£18/month): 90% of users only need viewing/filtering (not creating dashboards)
  • Partition S3 data by date: Athena scans only relevant partitions (90% cost reduction)
  • Enable SPICE caching: 10x faster queries, no per-query Athena cost, 10 GB free tier
  • Set CloudWatch billing alarms: Email notification at £100/month threshold
  • Schedule dataset refreshes: Daily refresh at 6am (not real-time) reduces query costs
Governance and audit

Data governance controls:

  • CloudTrail logging: Track who accessed which dashboards when (GDPR audit trail)
  • Column-level security: Hide sensitive fields from certain user groups
  • VPC deployment: QuickSight accesses databases via private VPC (not public internet)
  • Data residency: All data stays in US (us-east-1 N. Virginia region)

Questions or feedback?

We'd love to hear about your experience with this walkthrough:

Return to homepage

Need help?

If you're stuck, check the troubleshooting section or contact us.