Unlocking Public Value

Thursday, 23 February 2012

RESOURCE CENTRE

Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood

IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.

A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.

Governments and Socialising

The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.

Central Government

Unlocking Public Value

9 January 2012

Scott Hunter, SAP Asia Value Engineering Senior Vice President, tells Adrienne Valdez how public sector organisations can leverage analytics to maximise resources, decide better, and increase efficiency.

“Organisations which decide to invest in a broad scope, process standardisation, technology and strong governance can expect a significant return on their investment, both in terms of efficiency as well as effectiveness.”

As social media continues to grow at a very rapid rate, real time trend analysis capabilities for these social media platforms, like Twitter, will be key to maximise political and social value. The review of unstructured data can help to determine public sentiment in regards to policies and programs.

While structured data, according to Hunter, will drive the typical dashboards and reports. The data availability and the analytics appetite will continue to grow. The speed to analyse “Big Data” is critical to have real time / interactive reporting. In-memory technology, a self-service capability that eliminates traditional hard disk-based BI reporting, will become a corner stone to analyse “Big Data.” Over the years of technology development, analytics has been proven useful in every enterprise, including the public sector.

Be it daily operations, organisational, or business processes, analytics tools help with comprehensive reporting and dashboards, risk management, operations transparency, logistics, budgeting, documentation, process improvement, and analysis.

“The Operational Business Intelligence (OBI) system gives our hospitals unprecedented visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times, in near real-time. Staff feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” edifies South Australia Health Project Manager, Eleanor Royle.

South Australia (SA) Health is responsible for the provision of public health care to more than 1.5 million residents. The department was seeking to replace two underperforming workflow management systems to provide clinical staff and hospital management with better visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times in its emergency departments.

“It was too hard to get through to the data. The reports were complicated, and the hospital staff, working under great pressure, didn’t trust the information and would still pick up the phone,”Royle adds. Public sector leaders play a crucial role and are cautious of their steps in organisational development. In adopting new technology, leaders keep in mind change management, knowledge creation and transfer, simulation and training, and personnel adjustment, apart from relative costs.

“Often times I find public sector leaders want to measure everything. Leaders should measure for improvement, not accounting, focus on what matters, and push past organisational boundaries. Many public sector organisations have never mapped their processes and determined the correct metrics to measure those processes,” Hunter says.

But, stating various “special” values of analytics to the public sector such as: better impact of IT on society and quality of life, such as medical services, food & shelter, safe streets; bigger role of IT on policies and legislation, including closing the digital divide and economic development; increased focus on key priorities like economic development by freeing resources from transactional work; and improved constituent service by increased responsiveness, analytics proves to be a low risk opportunity worth investing in.

Hunter explains that public sector initiatives should be planned using the following tools:

a. Comprehensive IT Roadmap – understand the interdependencies of the solution set

b. Simplify the IT landscape – sunset legacy systems as soon as possible

c. Comprehensive Data Roadmap – understand where the data resides (database, data warehouse, data mart), how clean is the data, how often is the data refreshed, where does the data come from, etc

d. Business process simplification, standardisation, harmonisation, best practices, etc

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SPOTLIGHT

SA Health chose a combination of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise and Sybase IQ to create a powerful analytic connection between its data source and SAP Business Objects business intelligence solution

“We selected Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise as our major source of data and Sybase IQ to power our data warehouse. The aggregations and processing of data is very important for clinical systems, and Sybase’s ability to analyse very large sets of data in real time was one of the main reasons for our decision,” Royle explains.

The OBI system reduces lag in access to performance metrics from weeks to minutes, connects eight emergency departments, 12 metropolitan public hospitals, 17 regional hospitals and SA Ambulance Services, and provides clinical staff, paramedics and hospital management with unprecedented visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times

SA Health now has the information sourced from OBI available to the public. An external site provides information on bed capacities and waiting times for emergency departments and elective surgery procedures, updated every 30 minutes.

“We are seeing a significant increase in the use of mobile devices. The public wants to consume data and interact with government via these devices. For example, rather than standing in long lines to pay a fine or renew a driver’s license, younger constituents would rather complete the transaction via a mobile device. Hence, mobility, security and transparency must be considered and planned for,” Hunter notes as he shares the following pointers for the public sector in leveraging analytics:

a. Clearly state the vision and goals of the organisation

b. Determine the specific Key Performance Indicators that will be measured to drive efficiency and improve performance

c. Measure what matters. Select a few metrics to focus on initially

d. Understand the data model. Determine how clean the data is

e. Change management becomes very important – metrics drives behavior – behavior drives value

“Analytics will move to real time in-memory technology and be consumed via mobile devices. Exception reporting and alert notifications will become the norm and benchmarking will become critical to establish baselines and performance targets,” Hunter comments on the bigger value analytics will offer in the future.