Local governments are caring for their residents by displaying data on public-facing dashboards. An example of such a dashboard is a crime heat map that displays statistics on crimes against people and property through an interactive geospatial information system.
For cities, these dashboards help bridge the gap between reality and belief, providing true situational awareness. When citizens see robberies on the news, it doesn't necessarily mean crime is increasing, so they can use crime heat maps to see statistics in their neighborhoods.
In recent years, more local governments are building these dashboards using general-purpose applications like Microsoft Power BI and Salesforce Customer 360, instead of leaving behind a dedicated solution set.
Agencies actively use Microsoft and Salesforce tools over applications built for one purpose. For example, instead of using a specialized solution for law enforcement, government agencies can purchase applications that address the needs of every office within the agency, or even the entire government.
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5 reasons to gain insights from analytics
State and local governments establish data dashboards to share information for five main reasons:
- Gather intelligence-based information. Agency can study activities by connecting people, places, and things.
- Evaluation of continuously repeated events. Government officials can identify trends in data and suggest steps to promote or stop those trends.
- Currently considering operation. Government officials can consider when, where, and how to identify patterns and trends that may impact their operations.
- Make strategic decisions. Experts may read the data and consider ways to improve resource allocation or address new challenges.
- Address management priorities. Governments may address considerations such as transparency through public-facing data dashboards.
All dashboards may fulfill one or a combination of these five purposes. However, the goal is to aggregate all data into the same system and uncover connections between datasets. Data can be analyzed and presented through dashboards to help utilities, public health agencies, public safety agencies, and more achieve their goals.
Consider this: Data literacy in government is empowering data-driven decision-making.
Technical and operational challenges to data aggregation
Please note that the data displayed on the dashboard is not collected for the dashboard. collected for other reasons. Dashboards display the results of analysis of several sources of existing data.
When working on data sharing initiatives at CDW, we often encounter siled data. The first recommendation is usually to create a data warehouse. By sending data through a data warehouse, authorities can find performance opportunities in the data and normalize the data to standardize its format. Applications like Power BI query that warehouse.
Introducing semi-structured and unstructured data into these enterprises is a major challenge. In some cases, unstructured data is a live, raw data stream that is not recorded in a database. For example, storing a complete stream with complete telemetry data can be prohibitively expensive. Storing large video files forever can also be costly. The government cannot afford to do that.
But if you get enough of that data to analyze, the results can be great. Government agencies can track vehicle patterns and assess the routes they use. You can then determine where agencies can respond more efficiently or address pressing concerns.
With any data sharing project, governments can face political, technical, and operational challenges. However, there are significant benefits to overcoming these challenges and establishing public-facing data dashboards to enhance citizen services.
This article is part of state tech's Citizen blog series.