Forward-thinking South African firms in the financial, telecoms and customer-driven sectors are adopting data analytics to create competitive advantage, with the next take-up wave expected in government.
This is according to Berry Diepeveen, IT advisory leader for Ernst & Young Africa, who says, while there has been lots of analytics activity in the country's private sector, this will change as government realises the importance of advanced analytics to improve decision-making.
"Data analytics is absolutely top of mind right now; you will not find a boardroom where analytics is not a topic."
Diepeveen expects a huge uptake of advanced data analytics at government level to improve services.
"My take on where I believe we can take analytics to the next level is in government and the public sector.
"It's an environment that is under a lot of pressure to deliver better services to citizens; in a municipality, for example," notes Diepeveen.
South Africa is comparable with the rest of the world when it comes to using data analytics, therefore using advanced analytics in government is the next logical step.
"There is actually not a huge difference in terms of where we [SA] are, but there is a major difference when you look at other nations on the continent. This creates a big opportunity," he says.
Mainstream analytics
Kroshlen Moodley, GM for public sector and utilities at SAS, says advanced analytics will help government understand citizen sentiment and embark on initiatives to improve service delivery through targeted interventions.
Moodley also notes there has been great awareness and increased adoption of analytics in the public sector over the last five years, but this has been mainstream analytics.
"Government departments are using mainstream analytics to aggregate data across different business areas, identify patterns in the data, analyse implications and make impactful decisions," he says.
"The adoption rate of analytics is increasing across government, where most departments and agencies are overhauling their legacy business intelligence and data warehouse platforms and adopting the latest analytics solutions to help them gain better insights on their operations, service delivery, and monitoring and evaluation efforts.
He adds: "Government departments are investing in mobile phones instead of desktops, because a mobile phone can enable you to do business even outside of the office. This unprecedented growth in mobile data requires structured and unstructured data analysis supported by analytics solutions to ensure effective communications to citizens and the voting community."
Moodley notes government entities that can benefit from using analytics include electricity and water utilities, tax and revenue authorities, statistics census bureau, healthcare, education, crime prevention and social services.
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