Market Research firm, Government Insights, predicts that business analytics is going to take up a prime position on IT priority among public sector executives in the Asia Pacific region. Rising concern over security threats, growing compliance requirements, become more efficient, and enhance and manage performance in the large-scale modernization plans are all driving demand for business intelligence and analytics.

eGovasia spoke to Gregory Wong, head of public sector at SAS Asia Pacific, to discuss some of the issues faced by IT executives from the public sector as they debate the merits and challenges of analytics and business intelligence.

Is business analytics an exclusive domain of private sector?

Gregory Wong: While the private sector (traditionally the financial services and telecommunications industries) can be considered the early adopters of business analytics, the public sector has rapidly caught up and in some aspects, has taken the lead with some innovative usage of business analytics.  For example, leveraging business analytics to profile and develop a “Single integrated view of the Student lifecycle” provides integrated analysis across the various domain areas - Students, Examinations, Schools and Teachers to provide the best understanding and provision of education resources and outcomes.

What are the commonly held views within the public sector about business analytics?

Gregory Wong: The term, business analytics (is relatively new and many in the industry, including the public sector seem to view it as the same as business intelligence (BI).  Then again, business intelligence is also often mistakenly viewed just as a suite of end-user query reporting (EUQR) tools, although some have added it with data integration. 

However, the more progressive adopters of business analytics  public sector organizations like People’s Association and Ministry of Manpower who have exposure to business intelligence recognize that it goes beyond EUQR + data integration to also include a comprehensive suite of data management and advanced analytical software applications. Additionally, some public sector organizations are beginning to view business analytics as having the capability to go beyond BI historical reporting to understanding future trends (e.g. why is this happening, what if these trends continue, what will most likely to happen next, etc).  Having the ability to answer such forward planning questions related to balancing limited resources against community needs is essential and why we are seeing increased uptake of Business Analytics amongst the public sector. Business analytics is backing decisions made across a vast array of public sector responsibilities including but not limited to: Water, Policy, Population Management, Postal Services, Tax Collections, Health Resources, Customs, defense and even to fight crime.
 

Within Singapore, how are government departments or public sector organizations using business analytics?

Gregory Wong: Many government agencies have completed the rollout of their ERP and operational IT systems.  As such, these transactional and older legacy IT systems have collected immense amount of data over the years but with no real ability to make sense out of the data nor converting it into knowledge or intelligence.  Government agencies now use business analytics to readily access this valuable data from a centralized repository for analysis to help them better understand and view information from different perspectives. Using business analytics helps them develop more effective policies and improve service delivery. 

For example, the People’s Association (PA), a government agency that plays an important part in Singapore’s nation-building efforts, uses SAS business analytics to help strengthen public communities by providing PA with an enterprise-wide intelligence platform to efficiently consolidate and access a wealth of information to both improve PA’s own performance and to provide the level of service Singapore’s citizens and residents expect from their government.

Another example is the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) whose mission is to achieve a globally competitive work force and great workplace for a cohesive society and a secure economic future for all Singaporeans, leverages on SAS Business Analytics to effectively collate and synthesize data from disparate sources to provide a holistic one-MOM view of information that can then be used to enhance its policy making and operational effectiveness.       

To what extent can government organizations further improve service delivery using business analytics - beyond what they already use them today?

Gregory Wong: With government organizations enhancing their multi-channel services delivery and collaborating towards e-government, business analytics can help provide deeper insights into citizens needs and preferences, experiences and interactions across all channels – everything they see, everything they did or did not do, will provide useful information on the individual’s usage patterns with the potential to perhaps even anticipating the needs and expectations of various customer groups.  This could be about catching fraudsters to matching housing and development needs.

Cite new/future trends that will impact the way public organizations view and use business analytics.

Gregory Wong: While the end-to-end capabilities of business analytics spanning from data management, reporting, forecasting to predictive modelling exists today, most of the implementation have not capitalised on the full power of business analytics.  I do believe the next big thing for government agencies is to bring business analytics usage to the next level where they can exploit the advanced analytical capabilities like forecasting, predictive analytics and optimization to develop deeper customer insights so that public agencies can be more proactive, more responsive and deliver more personalised information and services.