Analytics for governments

 

Mostly business analytics is used to help corporation compete with each others. However, governments do not compete at all unless it is a war. The first examples of using analytics by politician were during national defense.  First computers were made in order to calculate the weaponize missiles trajectory. In the military field analytics are widely used by secret service including automated analysis of text and voice messages.

Nowadays local administrations, state administrations, and federal governments use analytics. It doesn't necessarily higher competitiveness but produces more effective results. Analysis of crime statistic in order to avoid any rule breaking was the most successful at the local level. In New York the program CompStat connects crimes with city’s districts and advises where to place more police departments.

There are many types of using analytics at the state level some of them cause significant saving of money. A few states, including Massachusetts, implement income optimization types which already earned hundreds of millions dollars. These are both taxable and non-taxable payments. Also states’ governments reveal fraud identification in order to lower percentage of illegal welfare collection, food stamps, and free medical insurance.

Departments of natural resources apply analytics for modeling and consuming resources such as gas, oil, minerals, and parks.

At the federal level one of the first examples of non military using analytics was monitoring citizens who try to avoid paying taxes. The campaign of measuring the honesty of the tax payer was launched in 1963 to analysis the kind of people who are most likely to hide their income in order to close the gap between the real and possible tax payment. The campaign was successful but the research proved to be very expensive. That is why the program was closed in 1988. However, IRS continues to practice analysis of law obedience and defining audit cost.

Healthcare is one of the most important fields for implementing analytics because it is the most costly expense after military defense. For example, Department of Veterans Affairs uses medical electronic records and its analysis. The article “The best medical assistance in the USA” from Business week says: “In the mid 90s doctor Kennet Kaizer implemented the biggest system of electronic medical records in the US. Beside this, he decentralized decision making, closed not fully occupied hospitals, and created reliable qualitative measurements. Hospitals of  Department of Veterans Affairs exercise analytical approaches such as forecasting modeling of chronicle diseases, scientifically defined clinical practice, automated decision about medical prescriptions. VA Department experience is one of the most powerful proof that analytics are able to influence government as a private sector.

Government all around the world more often implement forecasting analytics. For example, in Great Britain the analysis of criminal statistic showed that 50% of all felonies were committed by 5% of all offenders. The goal is to understand the crime logic instead of each individual investigation. It will grant a significant advantage to prevent crimes from happening.

Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris, "Competing On Analytics". 2010

More analytics thoughts you can find here: https://analyticsinbusinessworld.blogspot.com/2017/05/analyst-and-data-scientist-skill-sets.html