Putting SAS to work in Local Government

The Modernising Government White Paper (1999) set the agenda for bringing government's levels of "customer service" up to the standards that citizens now expect from all the organisations they use.

The benchmark of delivering quality, modern, accessible and responsive services to the citizen has been set. One means to this end is "joined up government" - departments, authorities and agencies must now work closely to remove the duplication of effort, confusion and frustration to which citizens are currently subjected.

A key enabler of joined-up government will be the provision of joined-up data drawn from operating information systems. This task is difficult given the broad range of platforms in use in local government. SAS has a fully integrated suite of software that has evolved over time through development as opposed to acquisition. The key benefit realised by SAS customers is that implementation risk is reduced, as all consulting effort is focused on delivery of the final objective as opposed to the integration of multiple tool sets. SAS complies with the key requirements identified to provide open government.

SAS is fully compliant with the e-GIF standards. In particular:

• Interconnection Standards: SAS supports, as appropriate to their function, the IETF TCP/IP Interconnection Specifications cited by e-GIF.
• Data Integration Standards and Specifications: SAS provides native support for the Data Integration specifications relevant to the citizen-centric and "joined-up" service delivery. In addition, these products are neutral as to character set and as such can support character sets to meet the requirements for disabled and ethnic minority access.

Additionally, SAS supports a wide range of de facto standards that provides a basis for common solutions across heterogeneous computing environments, i.e. to support reuse of the solution across current and future IT infrastructures.

SAS may be implemented on any platform including (but not limited to) Mainframes, UNIX, VMS, CMS, NT Server and all prevalent Desktop operating systems including Citrix/Windows Terminal Server.

SAS has a rich suite of over 50 data access engines, which gives SAS an unrivalled data acquisition capability. These access engines provide native data access to the data source in question. The significant advantage enjoyed by employing this method is that of speed and data volume. Data extraction times are significantly reduced by employing this method rather than employing ODBC (for example).

For customers, this means a better return on investment through :-

• utilisation of the existing infrastructure, and importantly, the protection of the investment made in the training and development of the data administration team.
• the ability to extract the source data, without the requirement of additional data staging areas.
• implementation by experienced consultants, who understand the requirements of Government.