Santa has strong track record delivering presents to well-behaved children, but is his reputation in danger? The World Bank Group estimates that the world population of children aged 0-14 is expected to reach 2.06 billion by 2050, meaning he may need a modern and innovative technological solution to keep up with increasing demand.

The design of such a solution was the mission for this year’s Informed Solutions Christmas Community of Practice Challenge, a collaborative and competitive team activity bringing together all our delivery disciplines for some annual festive fun!

Our five Communities of Practice (COP) enable and encourage development in skills, innovation, practice wide best practice and external community engagement, and are centred around five key disciplines, Delivery Management, DevOps, GIS and Data, Software Development and User Centred Design. Our COPs host regular sessions throughout the year and bring together colleagues from across the company for engaging talks, debates and knowledge sharing sessions.

For this special Christmas challenge, four teams made up of people from each of delivery services and internal service groups set out to design the perfect present finder, with the brief that each concept had to incorporate the different elements needed to implement a successful service including data, testing, DevOps, and User Centred Design.

After much discussion, debate, and many Christmas treats, the teams presented the key features of their unique and innovative digital solutions back to the wider group, with everyone having an opportunity to vote for their favourite present finder.

Team ‘Christmas Cracker Classifiers’ topped the polls and took the seasonal glory with an exceptional pitch for their pioneering solution ‘Naughty or Nice: Santa’s Binary Classifier’. The main feature of the innovation was to digitise the way Santa classifies the naughty and nice list, ‘checking the outputs twice’, to create efficiencies in his work. The system would build on top of a classic tree algorithms with a novel and ground breaking ‘Christmas’ tree algorithm, in harmony with robust GDPR and data protection processes, and best-in-class functionality.

We look forward to hosting more fun and engaging Communities of Practice and Skills Development sessions in 2024.