From details in the census to the content of complaints, governments, local authorities and other public bodies have a mine of data about the communities they serve – and there are serious lessons that can be learnt from it.
And though sifting through masses of unstructured information may seem a laborious and mind-boggling task, there's now technology available which can cut through the complexity and quickly churn out some pretty useful stuff.
In Hong Kong, for example, the contact centre which handles queries and complaints for many government departments uses analytics to sift through data to find patterns, trends and social issues.
Every year this contact centre receives 2.65 million calls and 98,000 emails. Rather than simply reactively dealing with these requests and complaints, the centre's new IT system allows it to identify common problems affecting large groups of people and address these proactively.
"We previously compiled some reports on complaint statistics for reference by government departments but, through 'eyeball' observations, it was absolutely impossible to effectively reveal new or more complex potential public issues and identify their root causes," said W. F. Yuk, assistant director of the Hong Kong government's Efficiency Unit, which manages the contact centre.
SAS analyses written data such as emails, hunting for keywords and trends. This can have any number of helpful outcomes. "For instance, we can spot districts with frequent complaints received concerning public health issues such as dead birds found in residential areas," said Yuk. "We can then inform relevant government departments and property management companies, so that they can allocate adequate resources to step up cleaning work and avoid the spread of potential pandemics."
Visual analytics also enables the Hong Kong government to compile reports on key performance measures, such as the number of abandoned calls, customer satisfaction and the length of time taken to resolve problems. Previously, this could take a week to put together; now, it's a matter of minutes.
What's more, built into the system is automated spelling correction – for both English and Chinese – and customised lists of synonyms and short forms of, for example, different government departments.
"The public's views are of course extremely important to the government," said Yuk. "By decoding the 'messages' through analyses of complaints data, the government can better understand the voice of the people, and help government departments improve service delivery, make informed decisions and develop smart strategies."
The Hong Kong government is using this digital approach to kick off a barrier-free project for elderly and disabled people. Complaints data, along with population and geographical information from the census and statistics department, helped it pinpoint areas of poor accessibility and recommend the best locations to install elevators.
Big data in the US
Local authorities in the US are also catching on to the transformative power that analysis of big data can have on public services.
The Los Angeles county government, faced with budget cuts, had to find areas of adult social care where cost savings could be made. The problem was that social care services in the county are administered by several different organisations, all of which were uneasy sharing the data they hold about the 96,000 vulnerable adults collectively in their care.
"The databases are basically silos of information that are not shared by departments," said Dr Manuel Moreno, director of research at LA county's chief executive office. "Taking a conservative stand, due to confidentiality concerns, government officials previously had been unable to share data across county agencies."
This made it very difficult to identify common issues, duplication of services and other inefficiencies, limiting local government's ability to make cost savings.
Moreno soon realised that the information needed to identify areas of social care provision that required improvement had nothing to do with private details. Assisted by SAS, the LA county government developed a programme with the ability to analyse parallel sets of data, while encoding it to strip out personal information and identities.
"At the end of the day we were not interested in the actual individual identities of the persons participating in the programme," said Moreno. "We were interested in their history of service utilisation. How many times did they go to the emergency room? Do they receive inpatient or outpatient services from a mental health clinic? Are they disproportionately using the services?"
Aligning and analysing different sets of related data from different organisations not only helped LA county to discover inefficiencies and duplication of services, but also helped it identify people who were eligible for federal services, such as supplemental security income.
The programme provided hard evidence that helping homeless people to find accommodation saves money, as housed people are much less likely to depend on other government services. This evidence led to a pilot project for the chronically homeless, in which 900 homeless people were given rental subsidy.
By joining up databases the county government also discovered that many people with mental health conditions, who were frequently accessing county-provided adult social care funds, were also in and out of prison. This discovery enabled the government to identify people who could benefit from a human services programme which aims to keep them healthy and out of prison.
Amanda Gardiner, public sector director at SAS UK, said: "It is encouraging to see public sector organisations from different parts of the world understanding the value of the data they hold and how this can be used to their advantage. Not only can it improve public services, but data can be used to understand what communities currently look like and forecast what a community might look like – to enable future planning of services, resources and funding."
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