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Technology

Governments need to enhance operations with Business Intelligence

By Amelia Kwok | 19 December 2008

Adaire Fox-Martin, Vice president, Public Services, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan, discusses the importance of Business Intelligence (BI) to APJ’s public sector agencies.

Government organisations today recognise BI’s compelling value proposition to provide the public sector with the ability to manage the multitudes of data they encounter daily. Such information can be analysed and used as input to guide policy formulation and guide decision-making.

Organisations in the public sector will benefit from the convergence of market-leading applications in areas of their keenest interest, including governance, risk and compliance, enterprise performance management (EPM), BI and enterprise information management.

Intelligence platforms such as Business Objects XI, are helping governments leverage the full power of BI to drive performance management, be transparent and meet compliance rules.

The International Federation of the Red Cross, for example, is facing increasing demands for information transparency from donors, especially with regards to how their money is being spent. With the help of Business Objects, the International Federation is now more transparent in its operations, publishing donor information on its web site, including the largest donors and contributions to specific appeals. Using Business Objects XI to automate financial reporting for donors and delivering the information transparency now required within the not-for-profit sector. The ease of use and graphical facilities also prompted the rapid adoption of the technology outside of the finance department, as logistics and HR recognised the value of real-time reporting.

Business Objects, an SAP Company has been aspiring to transform the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. Our aim is to help public and private organisations take widespread data, create relevant information to help people better collaborate in teams and businesses better collaborate in networks.

In the Asia Pacific region’s BI Software area, Business Objects has been leading the market, and has approximately 19 per cent of the market share, according to an IDC market survey. Among our customers in the Asia Pacific Region, approximately, 15 per cent of our customers are from public sectors.

The complexity of implementing BI for the public sector is typically much higher. Data tends to appear in various formats and quality, and usually in significant amounts. If not properly managed, organisations can face inconsistency, silos of information and a lack of transparency. Governments also have to hold on to data much longer (typically seven years) as required by law.

BI technology is able to manage that plethora of information and present it in a way that’s relevant to the organisation, providing value to all areas and levels in the public sector. BI has the tools to enable workers at all levels to use information to make decisions more effectively, resulting in better service and productivity.

Government organisations can leverage technology such as EPM tools like the Business Objects XI platform, to improve performance. EPM works with existing systems to intelligently structure information and processes, using metrics, processes and systems to monitor and manage government and programme performance. This enables decision makers to close the gap between strategy and execution by cascading goals down into department relevant metrics, ensuring accountability, enabling intuitive modeling, monitoring, and analysis, and streamlining execution of strategy-guided plans.

BI can also be used for more than operational and financial features. For example, BI solutions are helping some of our clients reduce their carbon footprint by decreasing the amount of paper they use for generating reports.

Emdeon, a leading processor of healthcare transactions in the US, used to print and distribute as many as 800,000 paper reports daily. In 2008, Emdeon identified this practice as wasteful and saw that online reporting would benefit both business and environment. Business Objects’ Crystal Reports® is helping Emdeon replace their paper-based reports with internet access for claims research. Crystal Reports also helped the company optimise important healthcare-administration functions like on-demand information research, easy and efficient claims processing, and rapid report distribution to customers.

Through its BI efforts, Emdeon will save a minimum of 280,000 trees this year alone. Not counted in this figure are many other important environmental benefits, such as removing the need for electricity, printers, ink, cartridges, toner, envelopes, postage, fuel and manpower – resources once needed for creating paper and forms, shipping, printing information, mailing and distribution, and manual data entry into processing systems. With Business Objects, these costs that take a toll on the environment are effectively eliminated.

Justifying investment in BI for the public sector

The public sector faces pressures to deliver performance improvements and demonstrate results. Like its corporate counterparts, it faces the common challenge of needing to achieve increased levels of transparency, improved efficiencies, higher quality and better results with lower budgets and reduced resources. In fact, one could argue that the pressures on the public sector to deliver to its stakeholders – government executives, officials and most importantly citizens - are greater, making it more crucial for them show tangible results.

Public sector stakeholders are demanding increased accountability for the public sector value of government programs and systems. Government organisations are accountable to its citizens and need to deliver quantifiable results to better understand the impact of their programs and the people they serve.

High performance divisions in the public sector need the ability to rapidly roll out services, core processes and IT infrastructure, while keeping IT costs low, ensuring interoperability of existing applications and providing seamless interactions with their constituents. Agencies can achieve these goals with the use of BI. Dashboards and scorecards help monitor financial and operational performance against goals and link policy to execution. Government solutions from vendors such as Business Objects can integrate data, streamline processes and ensure compliance to help agencies meet their objectives.

Advicing government agencies keen on exploring BI

BI technology is assuming an increasingly strategic role as more organisations look for ways to tap into valuable data stored in their operational systems. Thus, choosing the right BI standard is an important decision.

While many BI products may sound the same, every organisation’s needs are unique and the BI solution must be customised to address those specific requirements. The criteria for a sound BI standard can be grouped into three main areas or requirements:

Functional capabilities

While it is not possible to find any one suite of products that covers all BI needs, the goal should be to reduce the number of BI standards with as little overlap between different types of usage as possible.

Evaluate the different tools against the end users’ specific needs. Examples of appropriate profiles may include executives, analysts, general business users, and external users such as customers and partners.

It is also important to remember that technology markets are fast moving and rival products frequently leapfrog one another in functionality. In choosing a long-term standard, agencies should also consider the release history and future technical director of vendors concerned.

Infrastructure requirements

BI standards must meet the infrastructure needs of government bodies in terms of architecture and workload. The chosen products must leverage existing IT investments and meet architecture standards. In order to ensure the performance and security of a system at a minimum maintenance cost, the chosen BI standard should support role-based management of various aspects of the information system.

Business Objects BI tools provide a proven, scalable and open infrastructure with centralised administration. It has an open infrastructure to support industry-leading standards. It also offers open connectivity to leading databases and enterprise applications, metadata exchange and sharing of adaptive BI change management and deep integration with leading enterprise portals and desktop productivity tools. Through certifications and partnerships with major suppliers of hardware and software, we ensure that our products perform effectively in various environments.

Vendor criteria

It is important to consider not only the services available, but also the extent of the vendor’s network of consulting and training partners, the availability of employee with BI skills and the number of other companies using the products. The greater the extent of this vendor “ecosystem”, the more likely the vendor will remain a leader in the future.

Business Objects has been a pioneer and leader in the BI market for almost two decades. Over 2000 development and customer support crew are on call worldwide to support our customers. We also have over 400 original equipment manufacturers worldwide, with the likes of SAP, Microsoft and other key enterprise software providers choosing to bundle our tools with their market leading products, out more than 43,000 customers, including over 80 per cent of the Fortune 500, and a network of more than 3000 partners and resellers are a testament to our market leadership.

Looking ahead

As BI technology becomes more prevalent, we are seeing government agencies of all types – health, and human services, transportation, justice, public safety, treasury, higher education and defense – increasingly turn to BI solutions to maximise insight, boost performance, ensure compliance and empower staff.

In Asia Pacific, we are already working closely with the public sector. In the healthcare division for example, New South Wales (NSW) Health recently committed to a multi-million dollar extension of its existing license agreement with us. Through Business Objects Dashboard Builder and Xcelsius programmes, NSW Health’s close to 9000 staff are equipped with BI tools to improve the quality and flow of information. Other initiatives are in the pipeline as well and will be deployed throughout NSW Health to improve the quality of patient care and facilitate automated monitoring.

In the economic crisis, governments in APJ are responding to the crisis by increasing expenditures. Business Objects is offering a Federal Performance Budgeting and Cost Management solution, an integrated solution which enables to maximise the mission impact of the government agency’s budgets by integrating budget, cost and performance. The solution defines and monitors strategic goals and objectives, formulates administrative and programmatic budgets, and provides detailed monitoring and analysis of program costs. As a result government agencies can move money to programmes with most proven impact and to realign resources where they are most useful to support strategic objectives and desired outcomes.

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