Consumers and citizens are accustomed to getting instant answers and results from businesses. They expect the same lightning-fast responses from the public sector, too. Likewise, employees at public sector organizations need the ability to quickly access and utilize data—including employees without advanced technical or analytics skills—to identify and address citizens’ needs.

Giving employees the information to meet citizen demand and answer their questions requires public sector organizations to capture and analyze data in real time. Real-time data supports intelligent decision making, automation, and other business-critical functions.

Easily accessible and trusted data can also increase operational effectiveness, predict risk with greater accuracy, and ultimately increase satisfaction for citizens. That data must be secure while still enabling frictionless sharing between departments for collaboration and use cases.

This naturally leads to a pressing question—How can your organization achieve real-time analytics to benefit citizens and staff alike? The answer, at a foundational level, is to implement a modern, high-performance data platform.

Make Efficient Data Utilization a Priority

Achieving a digital transformation in the public sector involves more than upgrading technology. It entails rethinking how services are delivered, how data is shared, and how your infrastructure handles current and future workloads. Too often in public service organizations, just like with their counterparts in the private sector, legacy systems are limiting the effectiveness of data.

These systems lack the scalability and integration needed to support digital transformation efforts. They also face limitations making trusted data available when and where it’s needed, including availability for real-time data analytics. Providing the data, analytics, and IT capabilities required by modern organizations is only possible with a modern and scalable data platform. This type of platform is designed to integrate systems and operations, capture and share all relevant data to predict and respond quickly to changes, and improve service delivery to citizens.

At the same time, modernization efforts that include a cloud migration can be complex. This is often due to the vast amounts of data that need to be moved to the cloud and the legacy systems entrenched in organizational processes. That’s why you need a clear and proven strategy and to work with an experienced vendor to make the transition seamless while ensuring data quality.

Meet Demand for Real-Time Analytics

Hybrid cloud data platforms have emerged as a proven solution for integrating and sharing data in the public sector. By combining on-premises infrastructure with cloud-based services, these platforms offer the flexibility, scalability, and capability to manage, integrate, and share large data volumes.

Another benefit of hybrid solutions is that they allow organizations to optimize their on-premises investments while keeping costs from spiraling out of control in the cloud—unlimited scaling in the cloud can have costs associated with it. Public sector organizations can use a hybrid platform to deliver uninterrupted service, even during peak times or critical events, while making data available in real time for analytics, apps, or other needs.

Smart decision-making demands accurate, trustworthy, and integrated data. This means that upstream, you need a platform capable of seamlessly integrating data and adding new data pipelines—without relying on IT or advanced coding.

Likewise, manual processes and IT intervention will quickly bog down an organization. For example, when a social housing team needs data from multiple systems to ensure buildings meet safety regulations, accessing and analyzing the information might take days or weeks—with no guarantee the data is trustworthy. Automating the pipelines reduces time to insights and ensures data quality measures are in place to catch errors and duplication.

Data integration is essential to breaking down data silos, providing deeper context and relevancy to data, and ensuring the most informed decisions possible. For example, central government agencies can use the data to drive national policies while identifying issues and needs, and strategically allocating resources.

Expect New Value and Use Cases with Real-Time Analytics

Moving from legacy systems to a modern platform and migrating to the cloud at a pace your organization is comfortable with enables a range of benefits:

• Lower long-term costs and total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Enhanced service delivery
• Gain the trust of data users and the public
• Have confidence in the data and analytic insights
• Immediate scalability coupled with increased flexibility

With a solution like the Actian Data Platform, you can do even more. For example, the platform lets you easily connect, transform, and manage data. The data platform enables real-time data access at scale along with real-time analytics. Public sector organizations can benefit, for instance, by using the data to craft employee benefits programs, housing policies, tax guidelines, and other government programs.

The Actian Data Platform can integrate into your existing infrastructure and easily scale to meet changing needs. The platform makes data easy to use so you can better predict citizen needs, provide more personalized services, identify potential problems, and automate operations.

Taking a modern approach to data management, integration, and quality, along with having the ability to process, store, and analyze even large and complex data sets, allows you to digitally transform faster and be better positioned for intelligent decision making. As the public sector strives to effectively serve the needs of the public in a cost-effective, sustainable, and responsible way, data-driven decision-making will play a greater role for all stakeholders.

The path toward an effective and responsive public sector lies in the power of data and a modern data platform. Our new eBook “Accelerate a Digital Transformation in the UK Public Sector” explains why a shift from legacy technologies to a modern infrastructure is essential for today’s organizations. The eBook shares how local councils and central government organizations can balance the need to modernize with maximizing investments in current on-prem systems, meeting the changing needs of the public, and making decisions with confidence.

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