Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Business Intelligence for Public Sector

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.

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