Business intelligence (BI) has largely remained the domain of the private sector, and government agencies have been giving little or no thought to applying BI techniques.
These were the words of business development manager for the public sector division at SAS, Kroshlen Moodley, at the ITWeb BI Summit at Vodaworld in Midrand this week.
He defined BI as skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision-making. However, he said, in government, BI, in combination with business analytics, is used for monitoring and evaluation.
“BI could potentially help the public sector function better to improve social programmes and service to citizens, he pointed out.
According to Moodley, if this can be achieved, it would greatly help with the ANC election manifesto which strives for “...an equitable, sustainable, and inclusive growth path that brings decent work and sustainable livelihoods; education; health; safe and secure communities; and rural development”.
He said it is difficult do so at the moment, because service delivery provisions are in pockets and operate separately. There is no single view of a department, making it difficult to demonstrate alignment to presidential priorities because of disparate monitoring, he explained.
The challenge for government now is moving from an efficient to an effective government, said Moodley. “The efficient government should support free basic services provisioning and high employment levels. It should be accountable and transparent to provide improved health services, higher literacy levels, and better standards of living.”
According to Moodley, an effective performance monitoring and evaluation system is not about fancy portals and dashboards.
“It is a system that will help guide the department to start making differences to the way in which it provides services in an outcomes-based manner, with the ultimate objective of improving the departmental goals, and with that comes improved departmental performance.
“Monitoring involves collecting, analysing, and reporting data on inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts - as well as external factors - in a way that supports effective management,” he explained.
He went on to say that monitoring aims to provide managers, decision-makers and other stakeholders with regular feedback on progress in implementation and results, as well as early indicators of problems that need to be corrected. “It usually reports on actual performance against what was planned or expected.”
Monitoring and evaluation, according to Moodley, should provide government with a set of tools that will help with collecting data from different sources.
“It should have the ability to profile and cleanse the data, and provide you with the capability to analyse, collate and disseminate the information generated to a multiple number of different stakeholders,” he added.
With this information, a government department can immediately see where the service delivery challenges exist and introduce interventions to those programmes and processes that will help enable performance improvement, he pointed out.
When implementing performance monitoring and evaluation tools, a clear understanding of what is expected is crucial. This could help in closely mapping requirements when deciding what technology is key to invest in, he said.
Moodley said performance monitoring and evaluation tools are not standalone solutions to numerous problems, or the answer to change the way in which government works overnight.
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