Our Trucking Industry: Keeping Canadians Fed During COVID-19
Jarred Cohen is the Policy Advisor at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. As Canadians grapple with the impacts of the […]
In February 2022, we launched the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Business Data Lab (BDL). After the launch, we held a series of BDL discovery sessions with stakeholders from across the country. In total, we hosted six workshops with over eighty stakeholder groups, including those from:
For each group, we developed targeted survey questions to guide the discussions and collect structured feedback. The main objectives of these consultations were to:
Here are my 10 takeaways from these sessions:
There is a real demand for better business data in Canada. This was, of course, our initial hypothesis, but it’s nice to have this confirmed in our discussions. A major motivation for developing the BDL was to provide Canadian businesses with critical information to help them make better decisions and improve their performance. We foresee this happening in several ways. To give some illustrative examples, the BDL intends to:
Stakeholders want help from experts to “tame the information jungle,” by analyzing, consolidating and curating relevant business data from multiple sources. Emerging private sector data sources might be unknown to some stakeholders or are simply too expensive to obtain, analyze and sustain. By centralizing this work in the BDL, these activities can reduce duplication and save time and money for Canadian companies and the Chamber Network.
With a limited budget and a small team, the BDL can maximize its impact by attracting top talent and focusing its efforts on what matters most to Canadian businesses. While there are many areas of interest, stakeholders told us they want the BDL to focus on business-relevant topics, providing updates in real time and getting as granular as possible. Core topics at the top of most data “wish lists” are:
Right after that is a second tier of emerging business issues that includes:
Stakeholders want easy-to-use tools to analyze data quickly and generate their own insights. Participants were interested in data dashboards that bring together key metrics from different sources. Useful examples include the Alberta government’s Economic Dashboard and the Toronto Regional Board of Trade’s Recovery Tracker.
These kinds of tools allow users to navigate via point-and-click (rather than downloading data and writing their own source code), to see summary stats quickly and to develop relevant insights, including comparing regions. Stakeholders valued data simplicity, clarity of underlying data sources and methodologies, engaging visualizations, interactivity, having access to multiple layers of granularity and business relevance.
Stakeholders want choice and flexibility in how they engage with data. Stakeholders had a wide range of experiences and capacities in their internal ability to work with data. Therefore, to be successful, the BDL should meet users’ needs and capacities. In some cases, users want quick and easy statistics — say, to support their policy advocacy; in other cases, they want interactive, customizable tools to generate new insights and understand the broader market context in which their business operates. Users with internal expertise and the luxury of time want to download raw data to perform their own analysis. Additional distribution channels for data and insights to reach their intended audiences include social media, newsletters, reports, blogs, infographics, data visualizations, quotes, short videos, webinars and podcasts.
Our strong foundational partnership with the federal government and Statistics Canada is seen as a core strength. This provides data expertise, enhances the credibility of this initiative and allows us to collaborate on data collection (through acquisition) and, potentially, analysis. The BDL can also raise awareness and enhance the use of existing StatCan data by businesses — including the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions. Compared with StatCan, the BDL has more latitude to disseminate non-traditional, or “experimental,” data sources that can complement official statistics generated by the agency.
Our new Federal Government Advisory Council can be a useful forum for cross-government cooperation on business data and surveys. This group consists of experts with unique perspectives on Canadian business activities, surveys and government programs for business. By bringing together representatives from10 organizations, we hope to promote collaboration, break down silos and reduce duplication of work across organizations. To highlight two examples:
The BDL should leverage partnerships by working with non-governmental stakeholders with similar objectives. Partnerships can add value at all stages of production, from data sharing and analytics in the private sector, universities and think tanks, to joint reports, publications and events with the business community. As with our work with StatCan, we can achieve more by working together than we can independently.
Engaging stakeholders in these intensive sessions improved their understanding of the BDL. We hoped these sessions would allow us to connect with stakeholders, improve their understanding of our objectives and start a continuous feedback loop to improve our outputs to ensure we meet the needs of Canada’s business community and government stakeholders. We were pleased to see participants’ self-reported understanding of the BDL increase notably over the course of the sessions — rising from an average score of 2.4 to 3.7 (on a scale of 1 to 5, representing an increase of 54%).
Ongoing promotion is needed to raise awareness of the BDL’s new outputs. The BDL intends to promote its outputs to potential users, including key influencers in niche networks on social media. We will develop great online tools and generate unique research insights, but stakeholders need to be aware of them before they can incorporate BDL outputs into their work routines.
These weren’t the only lessons we learned during these sessions.
To read more about our stakeholder discovery consultations, please see the full report here.