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SAS provides government the tools to better plan, monitor and evaluate, and deliver on their mandate for improved service delivery

 The role of government agencies and departments around the world is to execute their function to enable the objective of improving service delivery to their citizens.

But this in itself is where the challenge lies, as locally the SAS team works hand in glove with the three spheres of government, local, provincial and national, to aid them in delivering services to citizens. The SAS solutions, when coupled with existing proprietary and transversal systems, offer departments and agencies the ability to delve deeper into their information – providing Data Quality. The 8 levels of analytics.

How can you as a government department or agency benefit from an effective Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Framework? The process needs to tap into your existing systems and harness the masses of data you already have.

The real value of your information can only be tapped into when systems are deployed that can integrate government-wide data to provide a single-view, or story of events that provides the tools to make decisions. Enter business analytics...

• Standard Reports provide you with the tools to answer the questions: What Happened? When did it happen?

The use of standard reports in government will enable better monitoring of the success of a project. For example: How many homes have we built and how many were we supposed to have built as per our commitment as a department?

• Ad Hoc Reports can be used to provide the answers for the questions: How many? How often? Where?

These are custom reports that provide specific detail on questions that government has of its departments. Namely, how many patients does the HIV clinic in a region see per week, how many doctors are on site, and are we over or under resourced?

• Query Drilldown or OLAP as it is more commonly known, will enable you to gain more insight into: Where exactly is the problem? How do we find the answers?

This provides the extra information you need to know from your data, and allows for discovery as you can now manipulate the data to get the answers. For example: How many people in our municipality pay rates and taxes or is this a municipality which is populated with low cost housing? If we don’t have enough money to service the community from the rates and taxes paid, where else can we source funding and resources from?

• Alerts provide you with the necessary information to answer: When should we react? What actions are needed now?

These provide departments and agencies with the ability to be proactive as opposed to reactive. In the same vein that sales people receive alerts when targets are falling behind, so government departments and agencies can receive alerts to notify them when a potential problem is rearing its head. If the projects within the Government Programme of Action are running late, and we need to notify key stakeholders – we can send those alerts and notifications via e-mail, SMS, RSS feeds or as red dials on a scorecard or dashboard.

• Statistical Analysis is one of the more effective steps as it can answer: Why is it happening? What opportunities are we missing? How many people in our region are requesting social grants, is this number increasing, and how is it linked to the unemployment figures of our area?

With statistical analysis government can run complex analytics, like frequency models and regression analysis. Departments can now begin to look at why things are happening using the stored data and then begin to answer questions based on the data.

• Forecasting offers government the ability to look ahead and answer: What if these trends continue? How much is needed? When will it be needed?

We need more facilities to cater for taxis as there is a growing demand for public transport in the area. Is this linked to a specific project in the area calling for casual labour? Or has a shopping mall opened in the area and will the public transport need be a permanent one? Forecasting is one of the hottest markets – and the hottest analytical application – right now. It applies everywhere. In particular, forecasting demand helps supply just enough services, so you don’t run out or have too much.

• Predictive Modelling is needed to help you try to answer questions for tomorrow: What will happen next? How will it affect my business?

If we have 10 million citizens and want to do a health awareness campaign around HIV/AIDS, who’s most likely to respond? How do we segment that population group? And how do we determine who’s most likely to participate? Predictive modelling provides the answers.

• Optimisation allows us to take the evaluation and implement: How do we do things better? What is the best decision for a complex problem?

Given government strategic and development priorities, resource constraints and available technology, you can determine the best way to optimise your IT systems in government to speed up processing and at the same time increase departmental productivity, lower costs for departments and improve the effectiveness of service delivery to citizens. Optimisation supports innovation. It takes existing resources and needs into consideration and helps government find the best possible way to accomplish its goals.

The local SAS Public Sector team is headquartered in the heart of Pretoria, with access to its national offices. With a wealth of experience in the government sector the team works closely with clients, identifying through needs analysis the express individual requirements of each customer. The technical team then tailors the SAS solutions to meet these specific demands.

Since 1976 SAS has been giving governments around the world The Power to Know®.

C O N T A C T

SAS Institute Pretoria
Hadefields office Park;
Building F, ground Floor;
1267 Pretorius street; Hatfield; Pretoria

Tel: +27 11 713-3400
or Fax: +27 11 713-3401

SAS South Africa office services South Africa,
Sub-Saharan Africa & Mauritius