Health planners from global to local levels must anticipate year-to-year andweek-to-week variation in seasonal influenza activity when planning for andresponding to epidemics to mitigate their impact. To help with this, countries routinelycollect incidence of mild and severe respiratory illness and virologic data oncirculating subtypes and use this data for situational awareness, burden of diseaseestimates and severity assessments. Advanced analytics and modelling areincreasingly used to aid planning and response activities by describing key featuresof influenza activity for a given location and generating forecasts that can betranslated to useful actions such as enhanced risk communications, and informingclinical supply chains. Here, we describe the formation of the Influenza IncidenceAnalytics Group (IIAG),a coordinated global effort to apply advanced analytics andmodelling to public influenza data, both epidemiological and virologic, in real-time andthus provide additional insights to countries who provide routine surveillance data toWHO. Our objectives are to systematically increase the value of data to healthplanners by applying advanced analytics and forecasting and for results to beimmediately reproducible and deployable using an open repository of data and code.We expect the resources we develop and the associated community to provide anattractive option for the open analysis of key epidemiological data during seasonalepidemics and the early stages of an influenza pandemic.