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Get smart with your data

State, Coast Guard, FDA put business intelligence to work

By David Essex

In this report

Sifting the data (.pdf)

Business Intelligence

Checklist

● Calculate each vendor’s system integration, consulting and maintenance fees with the software price to create a ratio. You might spot a low bid that will cost more in the long run and stick you with a system that is more complex than you want.

● Don’t risk creating a hard-to-tame leviathan by trying to do everything at once. Start with one or two applications that show users and senior management a fast return on investment.

● Include the factors in your balanced score card in the request for proposals. It will show whether a tool can find and analyze the data you need for performance-management reporting.

● Ask whether you’ll need a systems administrator to run reports or if users can handle it themselves. To be effective, BI must be accessible by people at all levels and in multiple departments.

● Get departments to agree on common performance management criteria. It is key to agency standardization and necessary for comparing performance across departments.

Resources

Business Objects (www.businessobjects.com)
Cognos (www.cognos.com)
Oracle (www.oracle.com)
SAS (www.sas.com)

Government agencies often have an acute case of performance anxiety. Tight budgets force managers to do more with fewer resources, and mandates such as the Government Performance and Results Act demand mechanisms for gauging the performance of tax dollars, products and services, irrespective of cost.

Business intelligence programs can make it easier to gather the statistics and other information for answering the “how are we doing” question for both financial and non-financial performance metrics, then manage the plans and projects that are designed to improve performance.

BI’s raw material is structured data, though the newest software also works on the unstructured data in word processor files and Web pages.

This twofold value is readily apparent in a Business Objects application running in the State Department’s Public Diplomacy office.

Cherreka Montgomery, the office’s performance measurement officer, said it is the first application at State to track performance-based budgeting at the level of program outcomes, not just dollars. “This has never been done for Public Diplomacy,” she said.

The previous system examined 900 performance measures that were slanted toward shortterm outputs, not long-term outcomes. The new Business Objects application reduced the hodgepodge to 15 measurements, nine of which are annual and long-term outcomes, such as surveys that gauge how well foreign audiences understand the United States.

Starting with a dashboard populated by manual extraction from an SPSS database, the agency next plans a much more ambitious performance-based budgeting system, that it will deploy it to seven posts this spring, Montgomery said.

The Coast Guard’s Acquisition Directorate uses the business intelligence suite from SAS for financial reporting and analysis in addition to performance management, said Greg Cohen, chief of business management and metrics. The agency began using the software to generate metrics and reports on products in the Deepwater infrastructure improvement program but has broadened its use; now more than 300 people use it.

Cohen runs the software on two servers with the help of a few consultants and no dedicated information technology staff, and he handles training on data querying and reporting completely in-house.

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