South Africa positions its public sector to innovate

Business analytics helps provide more effective and efficient ways to deliver services

In his 2010 State of the Nation speech, South African President Jacob Zuma put the spotlight on measurable and quantifiable performance throughout his government. He earmarked 2010 as his government's "year of action" where the defining countenance of the current administration needed to be: that government knows where its people live, understands their needs and ultimately responds faster. In short, his commitment to citizens was to build a government that from here on out would be able to work faster, harder and smarter.

One way that countries with limited resources are achieving innovation is through the use of information communication technologies (ICT), including business intelligence, business analytics and data integration technologies. Recently South Africa has been smart in its efforts to exploit the power of technology in its operations while also being mindful that innovation is not an exclusive realm of ICT.

The South African government is not short of data. It has a number of legacy and bespoke systems that gather data daily, but centralizing data fast enough for the government to make use of it for analytical purposes can be a challenge for even the most advanced government agencies. Currently, a number of public sector departments in South Africa are overcoming this challenge and quickly realizing the importance of analytics as a tool to improve their monitoring and evaluation goals as prescribed by their president.

To that end, business analytics technologies from SAS have helped some South African government departments innovate in many areas, including:

• Evaluating the impact of government policies.
• Predicting national energy use.
• Reducing tax fraud.
• Analyzing national statistics.
• Promoting government transparency.

Read on to learn more about each of these areas.

Evaluating the impact of affirmative action
South Africa's National Treasury is using SAS to help evaluate the impact of government policies, such as affirmative action, on employment. In the post-apartheid era, social policies aim to increase the representation of diverse groups, and government departments have specific demographic targets that they must meet to ensure, for example, that people with disabilities and women are well-represented in public bodies. Using SAS, information on the progress of these initiatives can be viewed and analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including ethnicity, gender, geography, seniority and department.

Forecasting energy demand
Eskom, the national energy provider in South Africa, generates approximately 95 percent of the electricity used in South Africa and approximately 45 percent of the electricity used in Africa. The organization uses SAS extensively to integrate the various source systems within the different business units, including generation, transmission and distribution data. In addition, SAS has created a value chain performance scorecard that displays timely data for the distribution business unit's seven distinct regions.

To help implement and provide a single source of business intelligence support across the organization, Eskom has implemented a business intelligence competency center (BICC). The BICC team priorities include using BI technologies to assist with performance management, create a view on safety and security, provide current information to executives on the health of the business, align and streamline business processes, and improve the reporting process.

One recent BI project at Eskom involves forecasting energy demand to help prevent a repeat of the country's 2008 blackouts. Using the advanced analytical capability of SAS, Eskom successfully forecasts future demand across its entire electricity network. Real-time data quality also plays a role in this solution, because electricity information is sourced from various transactional systems, and data quality will be key in the successful generation and distribution of electricity to local and international customers.

Preventing tax fraud
The South African Revenue Services (SARS) is undergoing an extensive modernization process to enhance its enforcement capabilities for tax collection. In the past, for example, some companies were getting away with under-reporting corporate income tax and over-reporting the value-added tax amount paid, in order to receive continuous refunds. Now, using advanced analytics from SAS, SARS has a number of ways to prevent this and other types of fraud.

For instance, the agency can predict values in non-mandatory fields that were not filled in, and statistically infer outliers for audit. It uses text mining to detect suspicious activity and find patterns in reports, which can be fed into a risk engine. Analytics are also used to predict which of these suspicious parties would be most likely to be reached by a call center, and to predict which are most likely to receive a successful audit. SARS is then able to prioritize its work and even use associative and geospatial data to find clusters of fraudsters and links between the suspicious parties.

SARS is widely recognized and respected as a leading government department for public sector technology innovation and service delivery, and recently presented about its use of analytics at ITWeb's Business Intelligence Conference 2010 in Bryanston, South Africa.

Analyzing public data
As the official statistical body of South Africa, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) aims to provide the South African public, businesses and government with relevant and accurate statistics to inform them about the dynamics of the economy, the population and society at large. SAS offers connectivity to various data sources, security and ease of use, version control, as well as integration with Microsoft Office. Working with sensitive information, Stats SA is able to ensure more easily that only specific and allowed users are able to access data sets.

"We produce indicators which, are important to the economy; there is simply no room for error, and no room for a security breach. We are very happy with the security built into the system as it allows us to stringently control various data sets and user permissions associated with these," says Ronelle Brandt, Quality and Methodology Manager at Stats SA.

Ensuring government transparency
The Provincial Nerve Centre of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) has developed a business analytics application that provides an automated and integrated information management system to monitor and evaluate the government's key performance indicators and to promote transparency and anti-corruption. KZN is a province in South Arica, and its Nerve Centre is the analytical branch of its government. KZN's SAS solution offers reporting and analytics, dashboards and geographic information system mapping. A BICC (or BI Centre of Excellence) was also developed and implemented by SAS for the Provincial Nerve Centre.

Social innovation with business analytics
Around the world – not just in developing countries – public sector organizations work in an environment where demand for services far exceeds supply. With social, political and economic challenges preventing the delivery of services, a common cycle develops: providing efficient services stretches government resources, but limited resources compel the constant search for more effective and efficient ways to deliver services.

With a commitment to provide services in a fair and equitable manner and ever-growing mandates for service delivery, public sector organizations need to constantly become more and more innovative in their use of resources. From preventing tax fraud to ensuring fair and equal employment, South Africa shows how business analytics.