Survey Says: Governments Should Give BI a Closer Look

By Greg McNevin

January 20, 2009: IDC advisory firm Government Insights has announced the results of a new survey that it says illustrates that current APEJ public sector investment in business intelligence is uneven, hold significant potential for growth, and should be used by governments to optimise business processes.

The analyst firm says that while business analytics solutions are not considered as important public sector priorities compared to solutions in the security, compliance, or risk management markets, about 42 percent of public sector agencies deployed business intelligence (BI) solutions for the first time in 2007 and another 38 percent were planning to deploy them in 2008.

IDC says that the new study, titled “Business Intelligence Solutions in the Public Sector”, examines the BI application market dynamics in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) public sector, and while it was conducted prior to the current economic crisis, Government Insights believes BI will continue to be a strategic investment.

“Given the challenges that government agencies face today, BI is a strategic tool they can leverage to manage rising security threats, forecast trends in a volatile economic climate, meet growing compliance requirements and, enhance and manage performance in large-scale agency modernization plans,” says Fiona Kanagasingam, Senior Market Analyst, Government Insights, IDC Asia/Pacific.

IDC says that the volatile economic and security climate, as well as lessons learned from rising fuel and food prices all point to a need for governments to enhance their analytical, monitoring and forecasting capabilities, and this will open up opportunities for IT vendors with such expertise and solutions.

“To leverage BI successfully, the public sector and its technology partners must reconfigure existing workflows to focus on collaboration, data sharing as well as integration. For example, by merging disparate IT systems and data repositories, and addressing legal requirements for privacy that limit collaboration. They should also mainstream the imperatives of BI into related technology initiatives such as consolidation and virtualization,” adds Kanagasingam.

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