Session VIII

BI in the Government

Government agencies can benefit enormously by utilizing BI capabilities opined R K Gupta of NIC

Up until now, Business Intelligence (BI) has largely remained the domain of corporates from the private sector with government agencies giving little or no thought to applying BI techniques that could potentially help them function better, whether it is at the center, state or even district level.

For years, R K Gupta, Deputy Director General and Head - Business Intelligence, Modeling & Simulation Division has been the biggest proponent of applying BI in the government sector and he has toiled hard to make state officials realize the value of adopting BI. Therefore, when it came to an event like Technology Sabha, he could not resist the idea of addressing a gathering as apt as this to push forward the agenda of BI in government.

In his presentation, he talked about GITA (Government Intelligence Through Analytics). Gupta’s brainchild, GITA is a closed user group initiative aimed at pursuing the case for BI in the government sector.

Addressing the attendees, he said that although federal agencies do not have the end objective of attaining profitability and bottom line growth like corporates, both face similar challenges at various levels. He said that government officials, just like corporates are often forced to do more with less, operate with tighter budgets and smaller staff, and yet provide better service to the people. Consequently, these departments are being forced to evaluate their core strengths and weaknesses and devise new ways of furthering development activities. In recent years, as IT has come to play a critical role in this drive, it makes all the more sense to couple BI capabilities such as data warehousing and mining with government computing.

Elaborating on how public sector organizations can benefit from utilizing data warehousing and data mining capabilities, Gupta spoke extensively about the availability of huge data assets with government agencies.

“Information is the government’s largest untapped resource,” he asserted. “Public sector organizations continue to amass huge volumes of data, through various channels and it is the information residing in these data sets that holds the key to more efficient operations. However, government organizations are now starting to realize that extracting information or actionable intelligence remains the key challenge for them. Here’s where the scope for BI lies.”

According to Gupta, there are a large number of applications in the government that can benefit from BI including annual budgeting, five-year plans, planning and forecasting, census, creating MIS, customs and central excise; income tax, rural development, etc.

He also focused on the importance of BI adoption by users and the criticality of identifying an appropriate segment of users to proliferate BI. He emphasized the need to appropriate funding for ensuring education and creating awareness to give impetus to BI-related initiatives.

Articulating the strategic direction for GITA, Gupta said that going forward he expects the group to expand greatly to include BI experts representing multiple verticals like vendors, research, media, corporate and government. According to him, the representatives from these verticals would meet to exchange ideas and listen to presentations by industry experts on topics such as BI awareness, benefits, application, consumption, proliferation. At these congregations the participants would also look into the merits and demerits of best practices developed and applied in large corporations and assess their applicability for problems unique to government agencies.

Concluding his brief presentation, Gupta expressed satisfaction over the fact that things are starting to look up, albeit slowly and that government leaders are upbeat about using BI in the public sector space.