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Figure 1 – For most districts, a higher Road Surface Safety Index (shown as blue line), corresponds to lower # of Accidents/mil Population (blue bar). This is expected behavior of which District 2 is a good example. However, notice the exceptional behavior at District 12, wherein Accidents/mil Population is high even through Road Surface Safety Index is extremely good. By analyzing problem areas through metrics and reports, agencies can identify potential causes (such as faulty street lights or unsafe rail road crossings) and take corrective actions. Government authorities will have to work with various agencies such as highway, rail, local public works, environment and safety officials to collect data for analysis and to implement corrective actions.
Deriving metrics to measure performance
Introduction
In the private sector, corporate performance is ultimately measured by profit and loss. In the public sector, government agencies are measured by the public benefit, as an outcome of services. The search for performance-improving insights is greatly enhanced when events are not just counted but characterized to note who, where, why, when and how long.
Measuring simply to comply with mandates or to keep up with trends, leads to missed opportunities to improve performance by making data driven decisions. Many in leadership positions in the government are trying hard to define performance metrics that align their operational processes with the desired outcomes. Everyone agrees on the importance of deriving the right metrics, but why is this difficult to implement?
What are the challenges today?
Departments of a government authority are engaged in multiple lines of service business. They differ in programs offered, resources, operating characteristics and service perspectives and this is reflected in the diversity of performance measures. Even when their measures appear similar, their definitions can be inconsistent or in conflict. In such a complex environment, the selection of indicators is typically influenced by compliance or accounting standard because the effort to do otherwise is high.
Data for obtaining operational measures is spread across multiple information systems. Data inconsistencies between systems have a cascading effect on dependent metrics. One of the key challenges is integrating the data from multiple sources and presenting the metrics in a manner that is easy to understand.
Integrated data vital to service citizen
The push for e-governance has resulted in departmental silo-based ICT infrastructure. As the valuable data is confined within department, there exists disparity in the way multi-agents deliver citizen services.
Timely availability of information for decision making is very important. As the volume of transactions and data increase, deriving metrics in a timely manner becomes a challenge. Executives may wait for hours to access information that is critical to make a decision.
Understanding exceptions in relationship is also important, as sometimes, average figures skewed by exceptional peaks will mislead the decision makers.
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.
Solution to overcome these challenges
Timely visibility to organized metrics is essential for better performance management.
Identifying the metrics that reflect progress on authority’s performance goals will be the first key step. Once identified, metrics need to be reconciled by analyzing data from different systems. Source of data and its definition is studied across systems to identify and fix any inconsistency. If the inconsistencies cannot be fixed, data transformation is considered to obtain simplified and streamlined view of metrics.
Once all data elements are identified, they are transformed and aggregated to obtain simplified and streamlined view of operational metrics. This is achieved by building a semantic layer which maps complex, diverse data into familiar terms across different service lines. Implementation of an effective semantic layer starts with documentation of performance needs in terms of measures and metrics. This information is used to design components of semantic layer. The presentation layer is designed in such a manner that users get what they want without having to spend much time in understanding the charts and reports.
Optimizing data infrastructure is crucial for presenting real-time information to executives. As response time is critical, data infrastructure should be designed such that processing overhead processing is minimal. Data infrastructure should be flexible to handle changes in process, systems and technology.
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.
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
Management needs ongoing access to operational metrics in order to monitor, manage and optimize services. It is important for Authorities to set goals, use right metrics to measure performance and align their operational processes to the desired outcome.
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Integrated data vital to service citizen
The push for e-governance has resulted in departmental silo-based ICT infrastructure. As the valuable data is confined within department, there exists disparity in the way multi-agents deliver citizen services.
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.
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.
