Advanced Analytics, the Cloud, and the Public Sector
What public sector organizations have achieved with advanced analytics in the cloud is not so different from what every industry is looking for: improved efficiency and greater satisfaction.
In 2019, a Slalom survey found that organizations explored artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) most often for two reasons:
- To improve operational efficiency
- To understand and anticipate customer needs
In the future, the 1,000 business decision makers surveyed focused even more on people, reporting they were most interested in starting to use AI/ML to:
- Improve employee satisfaction
- Increase customer loyalty
While a lot has changed since 2019, some things haven’t, including the popularity of these general drivers for advanced analytics — efficiency, insight, and customer and employee satisfaction. According to Dresner Advisory’s 2021 Data Science and Machine Learning Market Study, enterprises today are using data science and ML most often for research and development, business intelligence, and process efficiency.
The public sector is an excellent area to observe some of these enduring drivers of advanced analytics in action. This article gives you a closer look at two of them: improved operational efficiency and greater satisfaction among constituents and employees.
Efficiency in agency processes and data operations
Intelligent document processing: Intelligent document processing (IDP) uses AI to automatically extract information from documents like PDF forms, handwritten notes, emails, and text messages. This information — much of which is unstructured or semi-structured data — is commonly processed using cloud services. With AWS, these services include Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Augmented AI, and Amazon Kendra.
In the public sector, IDP tackles age-old challenges like internal paperwork and cross-agency sharing of data and files. At AWS re:Invent in 2021, Slalom’s Gretchen Peri told media outlet theCUBE how IDP and cloud-based AI services let public sector organizations, “unlock the data from those kinds of stale documents and move it into usable formats so that people can make decisions.”
“Intelligent document processing allows for more elegant ways of solving new challenges that emerge from legislation or court decisions. It can help agencies that are already understaffed and overloaded best fulfill their missions.”
— Gretchen Peri, Managing Director, US State, Local, and Education (SLED), Slalom
Automated extract, transfer, load (ETL): Before they moved student data to the cloud, the IT team at Atlanta Public Schools (APS) repeatedly ran out of storage space or had trouble getting access to data sources in a timely fashion. Slalom worked with APS to architect and build an end-to-end data platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS) using Amazon Redshift and Matillion, a third-party tool that automates ETL (extract, transfer, load) jobs to connect data sources. Automating ETL has allowed the APS team to more easily employ ML for such use cases as predicting student performance to enact early interventions.
Satisfaction among constituents and employees
AI-enhanced constituent service at call centers: Johns Creek used conversational AI to become the world’s first city to provide residents a call center experience based on open data. Instead of greeting callers with a phone tree asking them to ‘press 1 for…’ and ‘press 2 for…,’ Johns Creek can now automatically answer hundreds of frequently asked questions (FAQs). Topics range from traffic patterns and upcoming city events to zoning codes for different areas.
How we did it:
- Extended Johns Creek’s existing Amazon Alexa skill, which the city was using to alleviate phone calls about 200 FAQs
- Implemented Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center service, to handle telephone traffic
- Integrated natural language models using Amazon Lex to translate and answer questions
Workforce innovation through hackathons and training programs: In the public sector more than anywhere, a more data-driven, analytics-savvy workforce serves the common good. We saw this in San Diego, where Slalom once hosted a hackathon for participating members of local San Diego Law Enforcement. The two-day immersive experience, which provided access to ML-enabled services like Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly, exposed technologists to the power of real-time access to data, as well as the ability of cloud services to allow for better transparency. According to the CIO of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, the hackathon “opened our eyes to how we can improve the accessibility and performance of our systems, keep our officers informed, and provide better services to our communities.”
As another way to drive workforce innovation, we love how technology providers and agencies are coming together for exciting new training initiatives, such as the Nevada Office of Workforce Innovation’s recently announced partnership with AWS to train and certify 2,500 Nevadans in cloud computing.
Want to learn more?
These examples just scratch the surface of how you can use advanced analytics and the cloud to improve operational efficiency and better satisfy customers and employees. To learn more about using the cloud for advanced analytics initiatives no matter your industry, check out our music-inspired ebook: Smells like data spirit.
Lily Hicks is a writer on Slalom’s global AWS team. She turns bright ideas from Slalom’s great minds into stories with actionable advice for technology professionals.
Slalom Technology is created by IT industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
