You can now follow the G-Cloud 9 application statistics on the GOV.UK performance platform. Applications for G-Cloud 9 opened on 7 March and will close at 5pm BST on 11 April.
The tenth GDS design principle is ‘Make things open, it makes things better’. As our director, Warren Smith, mentioned in a recent blog post, we’re always looking for ways to open up more data and encourage an open relationship with suppliers. G-Cloud 9 is the fifth time that we’ve hosted suppliers applications on the Digital Marketplace and we’ve continued to iterate and improve the application process. We’re now publishing the high-level application statistics we monitor while applications are open.
Tracking supplier application trends
We think there is a lot to learn from how suppliers apply to a framework. That’s why we want to:
- monitor the level of supplier interest while applications are open
- know before the closing date if the expected number of suppliers are getting involved and completing their applications
- track the conversion rate of the suppliers who start an application to those who complete one
Ultimately, we want to use what we learn from the application trends to think about how to improve the service.
What we do with the data
We’ve created an internal dashboard on the Digital Marketplace showing high-level statistics. This allows the team to see how many suppliers have started applications, how many have completed them, and the number of services being submitted into each category.
If the conversion rate seems low in the final days, we can adjust the emails we send to interested suppliers to remind them when applications are closing.
While applications are open, all suppliers must remain anonymous from the data we view. We focus on overall statistics and look for trends. For example, many G-Cloud suppliers move their services from draft to complete in the final few days of the application window. It’s always exciting to watch the number of complete applications shoot up towards the end.
Opening up Digital Marketplace data
Making better use of data is one of the objectives in the new Government Transformation Strategy:
We will release open government data to spur innovation and economic growth, including additional, higher quality contracting data through our commitment to the Open Contracting Data Standard
On the Digital Marketplace team, we want to follow this approach by improving the quality of procurement data collected by government and opening it up to the market.
We’ll talk more about this on our blog over the coming months. In the meantime, you can read more about how often G-Cloud opens for applications in the G-Cloud suppliers’ guide.
1 comment
Comment by Peter Miller posted on
This iteration of the GCloud application process has been the slickest yet! Congrats to the teams involved.