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Figure 1 – School support officers receive information related to teaching appointments and finances from the Education Department at the Local Council. The schools send information such as pupil attendance and achievement back to Education Department. While the agencies involved have implemented software solutions to support their core processes they continue to use paper to exchange information with each other. This results in duplicate manual data entry and consequently delays making data available for analysis and decision making. It is difficult to analyze impact of services on student attendance or achievement because the required data is not easily accessible.
Discover value of integrated data
Introduction
After investing time and effort in implementing e-governance, government organizations are finding that data is not accurate and integrated enough to help them in decision making. While e-governance has allowed government authorities to amass vast stores of data, real insight on performance often requires delving into an array of disconnected systems and sources. As the number of systems in an authority proliferates, the problem is complicated.
Challenge in cleansing and integrating the data
The departments in a Government Authority use numerous software applications that run on diverse technologies and databases. Application portfolio in a local council typically consists of application software for electoral registry, homelessness, housing allocation, land and property registry, housing & council tax benefit, education, child employment, youth offending, home care, waste management, street cleansing and so on. While these applications support operation of an individual unit, they are not as integrated as they need to be. Analyzing performance poses a challenge because data required for analysis being local to such applications is hard to retrieve, put in order and communicate in a timely way to decision makers.
Figure 1 at the top illustrates how lack of data and application integration inhibits ability to service or take appropriate actions within a local council.
Improve public services through analytics
Authorities find it difficult to drive policies which require more than simple inferences from the huge data piled up. The traditional analysis can’t detect patterns and identify improvement opportunities.
The School Support Officer of a council school receives information from the council in paper form some of which is keyed into the School Information System. Similarly, the schools send information on student performance and attendance in paper form back to the Council for manual data entry into the Council’s education system. The Schools and Council exchange information in paper form because their respective systems are not integrated electronically.
There also exists a separate group within Local Government, which registers and provides work permits to students. Employers are supposed to maintain and provide information to Council, working hours of students in their employ. The child employment registry in a software application collects this information. This data will be also be out of synch with child and student data residing in other Council applications.
The Council now has unsynchronized data segmented across disparate applications. For officers in the council to take action, they need to see consolidated information on student attendance / achievement and their working hours. For example if a working child is consistently absent from school at a particular time (say 3:30PM to 4:30PM), it’s possible that he/she may be working outside the regulated period of working hours.
This lack of application integration results in manual entry of data across applications and ensures that managers never have the current status while making decisions.
Metrics based performance management
This case study focuses on the solution delivered by EXILANT to one of the premier education institutes. The system will monitor, track and report on project performance to various stakeholders.
How will we integrate the data?
Clean and integrated data is a bare necessity for implementing performance management.
When data is requested for performance management, it is essential to understand the objective, recipients, source, value and way of interpreting the data. An extensive analysis phase should be performed to analyze source of data, relationship between data elements and usability of data. During this phase, data from different applications is compared for consistency, accuracy and completeness. If data inconsistencies are identified between applications, they will be drilled down from aggregate to root level to find out their cause. Some data quality issues will require co-ordination across different government departments. Identifying such issues early on will provide sufficient time to solve the issues or come up with alternate strategies.
Measuring performance of Govt. agency
Government departments adopt ad-hoc approach to measure performance of their services. They need access to organized metrics to manage their services better.
During technical design phase, importance should be given to data sequencing, validations, parallel processing and mitigating impact from unexpected failures. The integration design should ensure that data transfer from source to target application is not tied to any specific channel. Some of the key aspects to take care while designing the solution include message sequencing, bi-directional data flow in real time, clustering for automated load balancing of traffic, configurable administration of the system and data transformation at both publisher as well as subscriber end.
If we take the example described in Fig 1, ensuring availability of real-time data is important. With application integration, it is possible to transfer data from one application (publishing) to another application (subscribing) in real-time. Also extracting, transforming and loading data from different databases to a single repository, makes it possible to meet any type of reporting requirements from departments, audit organizations, citizens or customer service. In the above example, a council can easily perform analysis of how student attendance/performance is influenced by employment. It’s also easy to cross check the accuracy of data provided by different employers of working children.
Government performance management
Government agencies face a unique set of challenges while managing performance of their service execution. We assist them to exploit technology for managing such challenges.
Summary
Integrated quality data available in a timely manner can change the way Governments operate and administer their services. EXILANT has extensive experience in helping clients with their application and data integration projects. We have expertise in diverse technologies for integrating application such as ETL based data integration, Message oriented middleware (MOM) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
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Improve public services through analytics
Authorities find it difficult to drive policies which require more than simple inferences from the huge data piled up. The traditional analysis can’t detect patterns and identify improvement opportunities.
Measuring performance of Govt. agency
Government departments adopt ad-hoc approach to measure performance of their services. They need access to organized metrics to manage their services better.
Metrics based performance management
This case study focuses on the solution delivered by EXILANT to one of the premier education institutes. The system will monitor, track and report on project performance to various stakeholders.
