A frustrated member of an executive leadership team recently threw his hands into the air and sarcastically lamented, “…we are the Kings of dormant data”! This echoes an increasingly common frustration in Local Government – there is plenty of operational data around, but managers and analysts really struggle to get visibility of it in ways that support their strategic, analytic and performance management needs.
Add in the maintenance of operational systems with ever diminishing resources and you have a perfect storm of competing priorities for ICT Managers!
The ‘silver bullet’ is the inevitable, but dreaded upgrade of ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, which are big, long, resource hungry projects.
Meanwhile, the need to access the underlying data in these systems only increases with growing demands on councils to be more strategic and transparent in reporting on service and performance levels.
Extracting data and ‘making do’ with spreadsheets is the usual short term fix.
But apart from the time wasted in doing this, spreadsheets have serious limitations when it comes to data management, analytics and visual presentation.
There is an alternative approach.
Recently, there have been great developments in a new generation of extremely cost effective, web based analytics and data visualization tools.
Most notable, in our opinion, is Tableau (see www.tableausoftware.com), recently included in Gartner’s ‘Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platform’ report, (29 January 2010).
By leveraging existing infrastructure (to load, cleanse and map operational data into a structured query language database) in combination with these new tools, significant analytics and professional reporting capabilities can be delivered in days and weeks, not months and years.
We are not a software reseller, but as analytics and reporting experts, we know effective products when we see them.
So, to help ease the pressure building behind that next big systems upgrade, it could be worth your while considering an analytics and reporting capability along these lines. And for less than the cost of one extra reporting analyst, that might also ease the pressure on your budget too.
*Markus Nolle is Managing Director of Inventri. He can be contacted on 0414 602 298 or markus.nolle@inventri.com
