Government, Health and Education

[JohnnyBgood]

Federal, State and Local

[Jane B]

Cross post is here.

[fgeorge]

I just cross-posted onto the Analytics forum where there is an interesting set of articles about data mining and its problems in the US Government.

[JohnG]

a little snippet I noticed in an article entitled Cutting edge technology and crime:

GPS satellite technology will soon be used to map every breath test conducted in Queensland to help police identify drink driving black spots. New South Wales Police is also considering adopting a simple email or “e-policing” system that alerts residents of crimes occurring in their local area, and asks them to become more active in fighting crimes in their communities. E-policing is already being used by some of the largest police forces in the world to combat crime, including the Los Angeles Police Department in the US.

[Steve Bennett]

Vic Police BI stalls on stage three funding shortfall

By Ry Crozier
23 October 2008

The Victorian Police's long-running VicOPS business intelligence (BI) system has run out of money with a stage still left to implement.
The system, which consists of an Oracle database, Cognos front-end and Informatica ETL, commenced in October 2006, but has been dogged by a ‘naïve’ business plan and inadequate funding to complete it as a result, according to Sergeant Martyn Cox.

“It’s hurt us really badly not having an adequate business case,” said Cox, who is an end user from the policing operations unit at Victoria Police.

“It was a fairly naïve business case. Make sure you don’t go in as naïvely as we did; go in with a good business case that will get you the amount of funding you need [to complete the project].”

The funding shortfall appears to have further derailed the project internally with perceptions that the BI project is ‘finished’, despite what Cox described as ‘strong demand’ for further enhancements to the system.

However, Cox said that Victoria Police would be pushing for $100 million in budget for IT systems this year.

Cox praised the current project manager, Brian Rowland, who only came onto the project after the business plan was completed and funding allocated on that basis.

“When Brian started discovering the real business needs, he discovered the business case was nowhere near actual end user requirements and the funding was never going to cover it all,” said Cox.

“Brian did a great job of rescuing it and delivering the first two stages.”

One current use of the system is to drill down and analyse collision data for trends that may help reduce the number of fatalities on Victorian roads.

Police can use this information to implement strategies in conjunction with the relevant industry authorities that focus on addressing thee causes. For example, alcohol, driver error, or perhaps a particularly dangerous stretch of road.

Cox said quantifying the value obtained from VicOPS is difficult because there are multiple parties and initiatives around reducing road tolls, and it can be hard to isolate which one contributed the most to improved figures.

Cox said the potential community benefits of VicOPS will amount to around $30 million, but this was not the primary return-on-investment.

“Forget the money side of it,” he said. “If using VicOPS saves one life, it’s worth it.”

[Steve Bennett]

EDS foils ATO move to on-demand DR capacity


By Ry Crozier
22 October 2008 03:02PM

An EDS policy prevented the Australian Taxation Office from using on-demand capacity to reduce underutilisation in its disaster recovery operations, it has been revealed.


The outsourcer, whose contract with the ATO finishes in 2010, was unable to accommodate the ATO’s request to evaluate on-demand services, allegedly due to policy and contractual clauses that prevent disaster recovery (DR) and regular system infrastructure from being hosted at the same outsourced site.

The ATO has not ruled out a future move to on-demand processing to power its disaster recovery.

However, in the interim it has been forced to institute a ‘warm’ DR strategy to increase utilisation of its existing DR site. This will involve handing off the largely dormant processing power to the ATO’s internal analytics team.

“We have a disaster recovery platform basically doing nothing and that seems to be a huge waste,” said Rhonda Bradford, a senior data architect in the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), ATO.

“We’re looking at assisting our analytics people to have more power and control by putting them on the disaster recovery platform. A by-product of doing this is that our focus on reporting will no longer severely impact the analytics environment.”

Bradford said the ATO’s move to a warm DR environment is based on the assumption that its requirement for a DR platform ‘is very low’.

She told delegates at the DW 2.0 Asia Pacific Summit in Sydney that ATO ‘had only had one incident [to date] where we really needed a DR system’.

Bradford also acknowledged the risks of opening DR capacity to production applications. One of the key risks is that regular users take over the capacity to the point where the platform is no longer suitable for its original DR purpose - and therefore the organisation no longer has a suitable DR resource.

This is potentially one reason Bradford is keeping a future shift to on-demand processing capacity on the table.

“It’s still on the cards,” added Bradford.

[admin]

From IT Wire:

NSW schools replace 65,000 ‘imaging’ devices

By Staff writers
9 December 2008 12:52PM
Hardware

The NSW Department of Education and Training has started a major technology refresh that will see up to 65,000 ‘imaging’ devices statewide replaced with new multi function devices (MFDs), laser and inkjet printers and fax machines.


In a statement released today, the Department said it expected to purchase around 30,000 new devices over three years to create a new ‘integrated imaging’ system across its network of 2,400 schools, 130 TAFEs and departmental offices statewide.

The refresh will include the deployment of an estimated 15,000 HP laser printers over the next 12 months.

HP will also supply toner and associated services across an eventual fleet of some 25,000 units as part of a three-year contract win announced today.

“DET is replacing up to 65,000 of our current imaging devices with up to 30,000 new devices, which will make a huge difference to energy consumption, copy costs and better utilisation,” said Paul Hopkins, chief procurement officer at DET.

“This includes going from a wide range of laser printer suppliers to just one, which will make device and supplier management much easier.”

“Nearly five per cent of DET’s fleet of laser printers has already been changed with a further 10,000 and up to 15,000 devices expected to be replaced before 30 August 2009,” said Max Kaye, business manager for LaserJet and enterprise solutions in HP’s Imaging & Printing division.

The DET selected HP through a competitive tender process linked to the State Government imaging devices contract.

HP said it will be using an internal Business Intelligence solution to monitor ongoing printer usage, identify trends and highlight opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce cost within the department’s deployment.

[admin]

Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet.com.au
20 January 2009 04:46 PM

South Australia's Department of Health has gone to market for the supply and implementation of an enterprise resource planning and asset management system to be deployed statewide across health institutions.

The sought systems would include financial management, supply chain and warehousing, asset management, budgeting and business intelligence functions, although no funds had been set aside for asset management as yet, with the information received in a response set to make a business case for government money.

SA Health manages $3.6 billion worth of assets, according to tender documents.

Currently the state's various health services and hospitals use different systems for their finances, supply chain management and asset management, including in-house systems, Masterpiece, Homer, Harmony, Qantel, IBA, SAMIS, spreadsheets, HIMS and others.

The statewide implementation of these new systems would ideally make no allowance for local versions, according to the tender documents, with the aim of realising economies of scale in support personnel, infrastructure and licensing costs. The project aims to provide users with better access to information as well as carrying out transactions more consistently and streamlining processes.

The project would also allow South Australia to gain a tidy one-upmanship on other states. "It is important to emphasis that a statewide operating model will place the SA Health sector substantially ahead of its counterparts in terms of process and data standardisation," the tender documents said.

The SA tender documents touched on the South Australian Government's broader shared service initiative, saying that although the government's direction on financial and supply chain systems had not been set, the ease of integration with any future shared services plans was to be considered. It could even benefit the supplier.

"Respondents to this invitation are to note and take into consideration in their response that the preferred solution may become the preferred solution across-government and/or utilised by other government agencies in South Australia," the tender documents said.

Another SA Health goal which the system would have to work with was procurement reform to reduce the $1 billion it intended to spend over the next year on supplies and services. At the moment over 60 per cent of products supplied are outside the hospital's inventory management and reordering systems. A national product catalogue developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority has been identified to help with this problem.

The target date for operational use of the systems is 1 July 2010. SA Health employs around 27,800 staff including the four health regions, the ambulance service and its own head office.

[admin]

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.

[Steve Bennett]

Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet.com.au

09 March 2009 11:52 AM

Tags: business objects, sap, sydney west area health service, business intelligence, electronic, nurse, record, patient
Using integrated business intelligence software can help harness the benefits of introducing electronic health records, according to a senior IT staffer at Sydney West Area Health Service (SWAHS).

The forklift's running around there in a fairly empty warehouse.
SWAHS staffer Trevor McKinnon
"The biggest issue you have with the electronic health records is that nursing staff are providing the bulk of the entry," SWAHS business intelligence and web development director Trevor McKinnon said in a recent interview with ZDNet.com.au. The nurses felt that they were not getting any of the benefit and doing all the work, he said.

Indeed, most of the advantages of having electronic health records were seen downstream, he said, when, for example, doctors were able to see the information nurses had entered.

He hoped that in years to come, business intelligence could alter this perception by running text analytics on the data from the electronic records to make nurses' workload less and not more. Business intelligence would use text analytics to "get into what's written" and pre-write a report which the nurse simply had to review, instead of creating.

"Business Objects certainly has the potential to do that," he said, although he didn't believe it would happen until 2011. NSW Health has a whole-of-state contract with Business Objects and uses the company's Xcelsius platform. McKinnon is one of the leading drivers of its use, taking on not just business intelligence for SWAHS, but for other area health services within the state as well.

Just as business intelligence would help electronic health record acceptance, the progression of electronic health records would help business intelligence. Although the groundwork for electronic records in NSW had been done, McKinnon said, only the emergency departments and intensive care were recording patient information electronically. In other departments nurses were still writing reports by hand.

This limited the breadth of data which McKinnon had at his disposal to run statistics using the business intelligence, with only information such as admissions and outpatient services available for use. "The forklift's running around there in a fairly empty warehouse," McKinnon said, although he admitted that the information being gathered already was prolific enough to keep him very occupied.

This data is currently used to measure performance for the hospitals, and Sydney West Area Health Service uses dashboards built on the information to benchmark how staff are performing. It also is used on the patient side. If a "frequent flyer" patient comes into the emergency department, the business intelligence application can inform the employees which professional the patient saw previously — this often allows cases which don't need hospitalisation to be given other treatment and sent home, freeing up beds.

McKinnon looked forward to when most patient records were being entered electronically so that business intelligence could carry out functions such as finding keywords in records which could alert a doctor to the fact that a patient may need attention, increasing the level of care. "We can't wait," he said.