The biggest business organisation

The government, along with all its internal departments and activities, can be regarded as the largest business organisation operating within the South African context.

Although characterised by similar complexities to other large corporate organisations, government faces challenges that many larger corporates are not familiar with.

This often means the need for business intelligence (BI) solutions is far greater, especially as it delivers a greater degree of control over some of the obstacles it is faced with. Let me elaborate on some of these obstacles.

If managing the customer relationship in the financial services sector is a difficult task, imagine the complexities that the public sector faces in this regard.

The 'citizen' is one of the most complex personal profiles to draw up, especially since the data that makes up this profile comes from such disparate sources - such as property deeds, municipal accounts, service bills, vehicle registration, tax records, census data. The identity and entity of the 'citizen' is not always well defined.

Following this - where the tricky part comes in - is fulfilling the need to add more direct communication, information and personalised interaction delivery to this basic information. In the worst-case scenario, let's use an example of a citizen that stays in a rural area: he or she has about the same profile information as a pre-paid SIM card holder, only in the case of a prepaid SIM card holder; at least there is a contact number - which allows information to be gathered.

Not every citizen is 'profilable', yet it is important they are included in the demographics of the country. Tricky task for government - I certainly think so.

Recently it was stated that instead of increasing policing and law-enforcement, SA should follow the New York model, which involves utilising a proactive crime prevention system. This entails profiling suspected criminals and tracing their activities so as to avoid crime from the start.

So, if profiling the retail customer is complex, make no mistake, this suggested undertaking would be the biggest customer profiling exercise in our country, with the most number of unknown variables possible. The typical petty criminal operating in SA hardly has an ID number, let alone an address or a credit card. So the question now becomes how to track his/her movements.

In the public sector, BI and automated advanced analysis techniques can play an enormous role in detecting a number of irregularities in government supply chain patterns.

Martin Rennhackkamp is COO of PBT.

It is a well-known fact that public sector organisations have large amounts of paperwork and are hindered by rigorous red-tape-ridden processes, which optimisation experts believe is the best processes to model and optimise.

But it is not known how much red tape and processes it would take to merely be allowed to investigate or model the processes in the first place, let alone audit it, automate it and gather real-time BI data off it.

How great would it be if ID or passport application could be optimised, as well as visa application, car re-registration, and house extension request processes? But then again, do citizens really want them to track and analyse the frequency of their parking and speeding fine payments?

Commercial organisations and financial services institutions have long realised the value that BI and advanced analytics can play in automatically alerting them to conditions that do not fit usual or 'normal' business patterns.

Many of us know the frustration of standing in the Forex queue at the airport - the flight has already been called twice and the bank must now first insist on a manual clearance call with a million privacy and security-related questions, followed by another number of drawn-out questions that frustrate most of us.

In the public sector, BI and automated advanced analysis techniques can play an enormous role in detecting a number of irregularities in government supply chain patterns, as well as other patterns and trends of import and export transactions and goods shipped, and fraudulent tax-evasion activities, to name but a few.

These are only a few areas in which it is clear that government faces larger complexities than any other business. The need for useful information is essential to perform their daily required tasks as government departments, emphasising the importance of BI systems and processes in the public sector.

No matter the organisation, public or private, there is no doubt BI plays an essential and key role is smoothing out the processes and the amounts of information required for certain tasks to be performed or for simply shifting though information to make it an asset.

The public sector is faced with a number of complexities that require BI, and for processes to run smoothly in the future, a serious look at the implementation of BI systems should be considered.

* Martin Rennhackkamp is COO of PBT.