Business Intelligence for Public Sector / Government
Business intelligence (BI) technology has valuable applications in all areas and levels of government. Correctly implemented, BI systems provide executives, administrators, managers, outside contractors, and even individual citizens with the crucial information necessary to perform their jobs and make decisions more effectively, resulting in better government service and more productivity for every tax rupee. BI applications are today being used to improve financial management, program oversight, procurement and logistics processes, and government-to-citizen communication. Public sector is today operating like commercial organization. They face unprecedented pressure to improve service quality while progressively lowering their costs. At the same time, they are expected to become more accountable, transparent, customer focused and responsive to stakeholder needs in a climate of shrinking budgets and resources. Government agencies are tasked with more than simply reducing costs and increasing service levels. They face increased scrutiny from legislators, executives, and even the public through Right to Information Act (RTI). This brings about the need to increase transparency, accountability, and performance as well as solve operational challenges, improve customer service, maximize resources and eliminate fraud, abuse, and waste.
The need for Business Intelligence in the Government sector is significant, urgent, and has the potential to dramatically impact service-delivery and nation’s security. By enhancing BI capabilities, government agencies can more effectively share and analyze data, resulting in improved services to the citizen and agency mission capabilities.
There is a wealth of information and data held within public sector bodies but who needs to know what? What information is appropriate for which department? With the emphasis on the public sector to make efficiency savings it is important that information can be found effectively. Define what information you want and implement cost effective BI.
The concept of business intelligence spans a range of technology and uses, not all of which may be applicable to every agency or situation. Individual BI components are assembled into customized applications and solutions to meet each client’s specific needs. Leading agencies will adapt best practices pioneered by the commercial world for use by the public sector, including empowering users with ad-hoc reporting capabilities and utilizing spiral development strategies to reduce risk and maximize project success.
BI strategies, technologies, and solutions within the public sector lead to better business outcomes. For the last few years, business intelligence — commonly referred to as BI — has consistently ranked as a top priority for government CIOs. Through collecting and analyzing data, BI creates detailed reports that provide invaluable system analysis. The benefits of these analyses are prolific; they can help determine better management of an organization, improve performance and lower cost of service delivery, among other things. For example, using the dashboard, the managers of the public sector have immediate access to the data that is most important to them.
Public agencies can elevate their performance with the unprecedented visibility and control with Business Intelligence software. They require operational business intelligence that can be scaled down to hundreds and thousands of government employees.
No matter where they are or what political structure they adhere to, government agencies around the world all grapple with a common challenge: finding ways to improve their interactions with constituents while managing the pressure of constantly rising case loads.
It is essential in the public sector to know exactly who your customers are; what they are buying from you; whether they are satisfied or not; how you are pricing your product and many more relevant questions. Ultimately it is about knowing who your good customers are in order to treat them accordingly. The definition of what a “good” customer is may vary from the private to the public sector, but it will also vary from one government agency to another. The only way to discover and understand these dynamics is through business intelligence. Here the customer is a person or a agency who has to deal with the government body; may be as citizen, employee, tax payers, property owners, patients, students, etc.
Improvement of customer services by building a greater understanding of the customer and their needs. Intelligent profiling can help government bodies improve their service delivery, rationalize delivery channels while making best use of resources and improve performance.
Why public sector requires Business Intelligence?
• To measure, manage and report on performance
• Logistics
• Policy formulation
• Planning & budgeting
• Statutory reporting & Best Value
• An aid to joined up government to improve service
• Public Information
• Inter-agency liaison (Single view of citizen)
• To explore hidden relationships in data
• disease surveillance & public health
• identifying tax fraud and money laundering
• homeland security
• crime prevention
Business intelligence technology has useful applications in many different areas of the public sector, including:
• Financial Systems
• Acquisition, Procurement / Logistics & Supply Chain
• Health & Human Services Program Management
• Citizen Relationship Management
• Knowledge / Case Management
• Anomaly Detection
• Intelligence Assessment
• Education & Campus Management
Government agencies can apply BI to improve
- Their understanding of their constituency
- Their ability to serve
- Provide accurate measurements of the effect of their actions
Business intelligence captures organizational data from disparate sources and presents it to decision makers and stakeholders in a simple, meaningful way via a user friendly tool.
Effective use of business intelligence can provide tangible benefits to departmental processes, the bottom line and operational efficiencies and can be used in many different ways to improve the management of day-to-day work processes.
Business intelligence (BI) is based on using the information held by the organization to improve performance. Defined information searching and reporting systems will lead to a more efficient, business like public sector. The need & importance of BI has to be properly recognized. If you are a CIO of a public sector organization, identify how BI can help your organization, your staff and your citizens, how can you make efficiency savings and achieve transformation using BI? & how will the use of BI gain importance in the future.
Public sector generally works in partnership with NGOs and private sector organizations to deliver services. Freely available data as well as appropriate measures for comparison are vital if all parties are to thrive. Data does not automatically lead to intelligence, nor does technology. Evaluate how to get at high quality, accurate and timely data, importance of an effective framework to deliver appropriate intelligence, improving the data shared between public sector organizations and their partners.
Reporting & analytics is important for spotting trends, public sector organizations need access to timely information in order to improve decision making. Making sure information is of high-quality, accessible and accurate is paramount to improving and measuring performance across the organization. The importance of accessing up-to-date and accurate information in a timely manner cannot be underestimated, but how can we accurately sift through the massive volumes of available information to uncover the best decision support? Historic reporting doesn’t give you the full picture. Also understanding information availability risks and protecting high-value information are critical.
Public Sector is critically in need of the technology to improve decision making and choose the best options for modernization. BI tools can ensure operational efficiencies and performance improvements thereby helping policy-level decision making. With BI, public sector agency can have all the information that it can at its disposal for decision making, planning and monitoring. BI is the cornerstone of decision making based on facts rather than perceptions With BI investment, government departments and other public sector organizations make better informed decisions. They can ensure that the public sector meets its key performance indicators (KPIs), and manages its limited resource well.
Take an example of police department using BI not just to predict crimes but to help officers and other field personnel score their expectations (i.e., intuition or instinct) against actual demographic trends. The idea is that the City can proactively blanket high-crime areas or areas of likely crime with police officers, who can in turn score their own crime-fighting instincts against what’s actually happening on the ground.
The laptop screen [in the police cars] has a typical dashboard — your incidence reports, arrests and crimes [and so on], and you’re interacting with it and generating new information by pointing and clicking. You can get real-time alerts — [for example, data from] court systems, warrants, etc. — feeding transaction-level information.
Posted on September 3rd, 2008 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Emerging Trends
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