SAS Nerve Centre goes live in KZN

Johannesburg, South Africa  (29 Aug. 2008)  –  Published by Computing SA

SAS Institute has completed the roll-out of an Enterprise Intelligence Platform (EIP) at the office of the Premier (OTP) in KwaZulu-Natal, which forms part of phase 1 of the Provincial Nerve Centre initiative.

The provincial Nerve Centre is said to provide an automated and integrated information management system complete with reporting and analytics, dashboards and geographic information system (GIS) mapping to monitor and evaluate government’s key performance indicators and to promote transparency and anti-corruption.

Desan Naidoo, GM: Public Sector at SAS Institute, says as part of an integrated platform, all components and services are managed from a single point at the Nerve Centre, reducing the administrative effort for maintenance of applications, users and security.

Naidoo says some of these reports may be simple ad-hoc /OLAP-based reports, for example: how many building projects are under way in a province, grouped by region, in say the last six months? Other reports may answer more complex questions such as: ’What are the characteristics of the projects behind the schedule?"

Other benefits of the Nerve Centre are said to include an enhanced citizen focus in the delivery of government services, as well as the strengthening of government to citizen, government to employee, government to business organisations and government to government relationships.

The need for analytics in government and the establishment of the Nerve Centre was largely driven by the need for improved service delivery, through reducing costs, waste and abuse and to ultimately service the citizens of KwaZulu-Natal.

"The key objectives of the Nerve Centre include bridging the gap between strategic provincial objectives and the execution thereof. The system will help to link objectives to tangible outcomes in terms of information on key performance indicators and programme outputs across departments and local government institutions," says Premier Sibusiso Ndebele.

For example, In KwaZulu-Natal there is a school where, every year in a winter, pupils drown when crossing a swollen river, an unfortunate consequence of what happens when schools are built where there is no infrastructure.

With the Nerve Centre in place, government can generate maps, charts and graphs to show that there is no bridge in the vicinity of a planned school-building site, a better site could be chosen, alternatively understanding this will empower municipal engineers to proactively build a bridge for safe passage.

Naidoo says similar principles can be applied in health, education and all other spheres of government departments.

"Now it will take municipal engineers and decision-making personnel a fraction of the time to extract the valuable intelligence they need, from a variety of sources, that will then support fact-based decisions needed to delivery better, more proactive services to the public," he concludes.

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