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Africa ripe for analytics solutions


Johannesburg, 19 Sep 2016
Razel Mushiana, GM for the Rest of Africa at SAS Software, says analytics is clearly improving the state of business in both Africa's public and private sectors.
Razel Mushiana, GM for the Rest of Africa at SAS Software, says analytics is clearly improving the state of business in both Africa's public and private sectors.

Fraud and compliance are global challenges and certainly not something that is unique to any single region of the world. However, this does not mean every first world solution created to combat this scourge will be applicable to the developing world as well.

In other words, while Africa suffers its fair share of fraud and compliance issues in both its public and private spheres, tackling these problems requires a solution that can be applied to the specifics of the country and market in question. The answer, says Razel Mushiana, GM for the Rest of Africa at SAS Software, lies in the effective use of data and, more principally, the analysis.

"In the private sector, many of the big enterprises operating in Africa - be they retail, telco or financial services - work with a lot of critical data that needs to be verified as being correct at various stages. As this data can relate to customers or even organisations, it is vital this data is credible. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the environment from which this data is received is deemed to be credible and trustworthy," he says.

"Similarly, on the public sector side, not only is there a need for reliable data in respect of services like social grants, where knowing that the person receiving the money is who s/he is supposed to be, but also in respect of security intelligence. Anti-terrorism task forces, for example, need to be able to sift through vast quantities of information to find the crucial nuggets that can assist in preventing attacks. All of the above can be achieved through the use of advanced analytics solutions."

Mushiana adds that it is critical for any such analytics solution to bring together into a single environment a range of different data sets from a variety of sources. In this way, a "golden record" can be created, which would need to be kept up to date with little or no human interaction. Once this is available, it means data can be compared to this record and any anomalies that are found in the analysis will be picked up.

"A good example of this would be if someone is fraudulently trying to claim someone else's social security grant money. They could in all likelihood be using a different bank account number to that of the real grant claimant. Through analytics, this should be easily picked up very early on in the process flow, and be flagged for alerts throughout the organisation and law enforcement agencies where applicable.

"Sometimes, of course, the adoption of such analytics solutions is not driven by fraud and security concerns, but by compliance issues. Companies seeking to partner with larger enterprises may find they need to improve their systems or processes in order to do business with these entities. This is because the large organisations inevitably have very strict compliance regulations, and unless there is adherence to the good governance practices, they may refuse to execute on the instruction of the forwarding entity."

"Digital analytics can assist organisations in the performance, monitoring and evaluation of employees, projects and departments. It allows for the monitoring of performance and output, and the measurement of this against baseline key performance indicators (KPIs). It also highlights any deviations from the core KPIs, along with the potential impacts of such deviations. Moreover, it is effective from an organisational level all the way down to that of the individual who is the custodian of driving the specific KPIs."

However, continues Mushiana, whatever the driver behind it, analytics is clearly improving the state of business in both Africa's public and private sectors.

"SAS is definitely discovering a huge hunger for analytics tools across the continent in countries in which we operate. We are certainly finding a growing willingness to engage with us on the benefits of implementing such analytics solutions. And fraud, risk, compliance and governance are still just the tip of the iceberg on the continent - the impact analytics is going to have here in the next few years is going to be huge," he concludes.

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Rodney Weidemann
ITWeb
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