Business Analytics: Four Rules for Success in Government

Few CIOs are as openly accountable as Paul Cosgrave. As the IT chief of New York City, Cosgrave is in charge of an online performance measurement tool that allows the Big Apple's citizens to see just what they're getting for their city tax dollars.

Launched in February, the Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) system gives New Yorkers access to constantly updated performance data from city agencies. Extending the reach of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's annual management report to the public, the CPR makes 300 performance indicators available online. The indicators are represented graphically with pie charts, which make performance trends easy to identify and comparable for up to a five-year period.

The system Cosgrave runs also gives city officials advanced analytical tools to run the city more effectively. The CPR integrates performance-related statistics from 60 city organizations, helping Bloomberg's managers make smarter decisions by giving them fast access to information about the public's demands and agency performance.

Dubbed "the mother of all accountability tools," the system is proving very effective. Using CPR, New York's environmental services managers can anticipate emerging issues and respond more quickly to problems, such as noise complaints. The CPR system's initial success is encouraging many New York City offices to plan additional applications. Already there are plans to adapt the CPR dashboard tools to track performance on other agency programs. City managers intend to integrate data-visualization tools to display service request information on a map and expand the analytics data offered to the public.

Innovative CIOs, like Cosgrave, are turning to analytics - defined as the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, predictive models and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions - to improve the delivery and performance of public services. Sophisticated analytics are rapidly finding applications in areas such as tax revenue collection, postal services, fraud detection, public safety, and health and human services. Local and regional municipalities, as well as the federal and government, are increasingly adopting analytics. They are as constructive in public service as they are in the commercial sector, where companies, such as Procter & Gamble, have long used analytics as a competitive weapon.

Recasting the CIO's Role
In effect, analytics can recast the role of many public-sector CIOs, shifting their focus from maintaining and upgrading IT systems to driving wholesale change for the constituencies they serve. By linking analytical tools to the organization's mission and values, CIOs can transform their agencies' effectiveness.

For many public information offices, like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and for intelligence agencies, such as Britain's MI5, data gathering and analysis is a core function. But analytics is now sweeping through more public-sector activities. Accenture's ongoing research suggests many leading government agencies can be classed as high performers - on par with high-performance businesses operating in the commercial sector.  

What's propelling such change? First, government agencies can access substantially more data, not only from publicly available sources, such as the Internet, but also from their own systems and those of other organizations. Many agencies are now more capable of capturing clean, integrated and timely transaction data. The data comes from more sources through a wider range of channels - from traffic cameras and under-highway sensors to e-mails and mobile communications handsets. And it's proliferating at staggering rates: According to a white paper by IDC and EMC, the volume of data added worldwide will increase more than sixfold between 2006 and 2010.

Organizations also have software and hardware can better capture, store, distribute and interpret data. There is more processing power on desktops and in data centers. And real-time business intelligence (BI) software, in which automated decision-making systems are embedded in business processes, is rapidly gaining ground.

There's also more demand for sharper insights and better ways of gathering and interpreting data