SAS Nerve Centre deployment goes live in KwaZulu-Natal

SAS Institute has completed the roll-out of an Enterprise Intelligence Platform (EIP) at the office of the Premier (OTP) in KwaZulu-Natal, which forms part of phase 1 of the Provincial Nerve Centre initiative launched this week.

The provincial Nerve Centre provides an automated and integrated information management system complete with reporting and analytics, dashboards and geographic information system (GIS) mapping to monitor and evaluate government's key performance indicators and to promote transparency and anti-corruption.

Delivering the 2008/09 Budget Speech for the Office of the Premier on 15 April 2008, Premier Sibusiso Ndebele stated that the Provincial Nerve Centre, which includes the development of a business intelligence (BI) system to support the Nerve Centre, will be in operation soon. The Nerve Centre is one of the key initiatives undertaken by Premier Ndebele to strengthen the machinery of government in the province.

Desan Naidoo, General Manager Public Sector at SAS Institute, says as part of an integrated platform, all components and services are managed from a single point at the Nerve Centre, reducing the administrative effort for maintenance of applications, users and security.

The Nerve Centre allows the Premier or any other stakeholder, such as a Member of Executive Committee, to view how the entire province is performing at provincial, district and local government level, according to the mandate from the National government.

"For example, currently all provinces are mandated to reduce poverty. The Nerve Centre enables the Premier to view progress of all programmes to reduce poverty and are alerted to any issues that crop up," says Naidoo.

Naidoo says some of these reports may be simple ad-hoc /OLAP-based reports, for example: how many building projects are under way in a province, grouped by region, in say the last six months? Other reports may answer more complex questions such as: "What are the characteristics of the projects behind the schedule?"

Other benefits of the Nerve Centre include an enhanced citizen focus in the delivery of government services, as well as the strengthening of government to citizen, government to employee, government to business organisations and government-to-government relationships.

The need for analytics in government and the establishment of the Nerve Centre was largely driven by the need for improved service delivery, through reducing costs, waste and abuse and to ultimately service the citizens of KwaZulu-Natal.

"The key objectives of the Nerve Centre include bridging the gap between strategic provincial objectives and the execution thereof. The system will help to link objectives to tangible outcomes in terms of information on key performance indicators and programme outputs across departments and local government institutions.

"Additionally, the system will enable the Office of the Premier to quantify and measure trends in departmental and provincial performance and thereby ensure current service levels are better managed and achieved," says Premier Ndebele.

For example, in KwaZulu-Natal there is school where every year in a winter, dozens of pupils drown when crossing a swelled river, an unfortunate consequence of what happens when schools are built where there is no infrastructure.

With the Nerve Centre in place, government can generate maps, charts and graphs to show that there is no bridge in the vicinity of a planned school-building site, a better site could be chosen, or alternatively understanding this problem will empower municipal engineers to proactively build a bridge for safe passage.

Naidoo says similar principles can be applied in health, education and all other spheres of government departments.

"Now it will take municipal engineers and decision-making personnel a fraction of the time to extract the valuable intelligence they need, from a variety of sources, that will then support fact-based decisions needed to delivery better, more proactive services to the public," he concludes.