5 Tips For Deploying Insightful Reports In The Public Sector
Federal agencies are confronted with increasingly complex challenges that demand immediate answers. Where to deploy resources? Who has benefited most? How to prioritize next steps?
From members of parliament to education and healthcare professionals, the expectation for insight to make real-time decisions is increasingly prevalent. This demand goes beyond the four walls of your department. British citizens, now more than any time in history, also have a pressing desire for information about their government. This hunger for actionable insight only increases the pressure to provide useful analytics in a timely manner.
Read this paper to learn five insights for public sector agencies to demand more from next-generation business intelligence and generate fast, insightful answers to the toughest questions they face.
We've also pulled out the first several pages of the whitepaper for you to read. Download the PDF on the right to read the rest.
Your budget is shrinking. Your spending is scrutinised. But the problems you are solving are more complex and urgent than ever before. Is there any relief in sight?
“Get Me Answers – Now”
From members of parliament to education and healthcare professionals, the expectation for insight to make real-time decisions is increasingly prevalent. This demand goes beyond the four walls of your department. British citizens, now more than any time in history, also have a pressing desire for information about their government. This hunger for actionable insight only increases the pressure to provide useful analytics in a timely manner.
Data, Data Everywhere
The good news: there is more information than ever before to drive decisions. The bad news: there’s more information than ever before to drive decisions. The vast amount of data created every day that government departments and agencies take into account is mind boggling. Effectively and securely analysing this data requires the ability to connect into myriad sources of data, mix and match the pieces that relate to the question at hand and extract relevant insight. Absorbing all of this data is daunting, but imperative. How do you avoid being paralysed by the excess of data and start doing something valuable with it?
Public Sector Budget Cuts
Every government department and agency has been impacted by recent budget cuts. However, decreased budget doesn’t diminish the need to answer critical questions. In fact, sometimes hidden insights in the data can uncover opportunities for efficiencies and solutions to help cope with the cutbacks. Urgency to get to the heart of a problem and find resolutions accelerates as more challenges emerge. Investing in a new solution would have to be affordable. Can you find a cost-effective approach? The answer to all of these questions is “Yes.”
- See it to believe it
- Get your hands dirty
- Share with others
- Consider all relevant data
- Do this without beaurocracy
Welcome to rapid-fire business intelligence.
Corporations have faced many similar challenges as those being faced by the public sector today. To answer them they’ve turned to a new way of thinking about business intelligence and analytics that is changing what is possible for their organisations. Fast time to insight, ease of use and visual analytics are core tenets of rapid-fire business intelligence. The ability to query every data source and work with huge volumes of data in a scalable, secure manner is mandatory. Visualising data and collaborating with dashboards in real time can fundamentally alter how decisions are made.
The value to individuals and organisations is tremendous. Comments like, “I’ve learned more about my business in five minutes than I have in five years,” “I’ve produced in two hours what a team couldn’t create in the last year,” and “we’ve been able to re-deploy three full-time equivalents because of the time we’ve saved with this new approach” are becoming routine from wide scale adopters of nextgeneration business intelligence.
Public sector organisations can benefit in these ways too. Your corporate counterparts have five tips to help you get the same level of impact from your data as they do, whether you’re analysing profitability or researching the effectiveness of public funding.
1. See it to believe it
Visualizing data is one of the biggest expectations you must have from your reports. Seeing your data makes trends, outliers and insights appear in ways that static reports and out-of-date dashboards can’t address. Whether you visualize your data on a map, a chart or a dashboard combining all of these things, the result is a fundamentally improved level of transparency and insight. One impact of seeing your data in a meaningful way is the ability to ask follow-up questions about what you see, resulting in a cycle of analysis that yields results traditional reports never can. Whether you visualize your data on a map, a chart or a dashboard combining all of these things, the result is a fundamentally better level of insight about why’s, what’s and how’s. This is even more important in an environment where the amount of data is increasing every day.
A human’s sense of sight accounts for 70% of sense receptors which makes visualizing data especially impactful. How easy is it to count the number of “9”s in the left diagram? On the right, this task is greatly simplified by showing the same “9”s in red. One impact of seeing your data in a meaningful way is the ability to ask follow-up questions about what you see, resulting in a cycle of analysis that yields results traditional reports never can. In the old model, the people who needed answers from their data would have to make repeated requests to an analyst or IT team to get the insight they required. Modern day business intelligence and analytics changes all that and leads us to tip number two.
