Analytics For Government

From archive: July 2010

Are our Future Leaders More Comfortable with Complexity?

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As government leaders do you believe the world is getting more complex? More volatile? If so, you’re not alone - - Sixty percent of the CEOs surveyed by IBM in our 2010 CEO Study thought the world was getting more complex, and even more, 69%, felt the world was getting more volatile.

For the first time, we also posed a similar set of questions to college students. These future leaders viewed the world as even more complex than the CEOs we surveyed. But they saw less volatility, and significantly less uncertainty than the CEOs (65% of the CEOs, but only 48% of the students). Could it be that the students are more acclimated to economic boom/bust cycles and feel more comfortable with the uncertainty of today’s world?

Or could it be that in the instrumented, interconnected, collaborative world that they are used to (most of the students never knew a world without web browsing and many don’t remember the pre-Facebook era), they feel more comfortable dealing with this complex world? As a student in France put it, “We will have more information, so it [the world] should be more predictable.”

We found that students who had the greatest sense of complexity put much more emphasis on the analytics and predictive capabilities of information. They were 50% more likely to expect significant impact from increased information than peers who did not have the same sense of complexity. And they were 22% more likely to believe that organizations should focus on insight and intelligence to enable their strategies. Also, interestingly, students in China were significantly more likely to prefer a fact- and research-based style of decision making than their peers around the world. Does that indicate that the Chinese students have been trained to feel more comfortable dealing with data than their peers?

With the baby boom heading towards retirement in the coming years, does this mean the government workers who replace them will be more comfortable using information and analytical techniques to handle the world’s problems? Or could it be that complexity will always rise to be just beyond our ability to manage it with our current level of technology?

Click here to see the IBM Report: “Inheriting a complex world”

Click here to see the IBM Report: “2010 Global CEO Study”

More on Analytics for Government here: www.ibm.com/ASCdc

Do you think our future leaders are inheriting a more complex world? And do you feel they are more prepared to manage it?

Comment on this blog or write to me at ASCdc@us.ibm.com

Good Analytics,

Frank Stein, Director of IBM’s Analytics Solution Center

Washington, D.C.

Prefabricated House Blocking I-495: Can Analytics Help Washington's Traffic?

fstein Tags: pain traffic performance congestion transportation analytics government commuter management survey ibm ‎ 3,482 Views

Many of you probably saw the news about the Beltway Blockage on July 8^th in the afternoon - - some of you may have been stuck in the traffic like I was. I had just read IBM’s new Report, “The Globalization of Traffic Congestion: IBM 2010 Commuter Pain Survey,” but it was little consolation knowing that traffic delays in Moscow were on average 2.5 hours, even as I watched my commute time inch towards the second hour.

Transportation is a key governmental function that has enormous impact on the citizens’ well being. Traffic congestion adds stress to our lives, retards economic development, and impacts the environment.

Performance Management is the mandate of the day for governments, both federal and the state and local government. In the past, many government agencies would measure performance such as the number of roads resurfaced, number of traffic lights installed, and the number of dollars spent on transportation. These were input data elements. A more recent focus, and one that is more meaningful to citizens, is to measure the outcomes achieved by the government agencies. In the case of transportation, an outcome might be the average commute time from one location to another, the average speed on a roadway, or the volume of traffic (or persons) carried by a road segment during the peak traffic hour.

Reporting on outcomes is but the first step. The performance achieved must be compared to the desired quality of service (QoS). Setting of the QoS goals for transportation and other government functions is worthy of a public debate because there are invariably tradeoffs, the major one being how much more one is willing to pay to achieve a better outcome.

Another step that can be done with the outcome data is to determine trends and predict what might happen if the trends continue. We call this Predictive Analytics. We can plan the transportation infrastructure that will be needed if Washington’s growth continues at the current rate (except for 2008, we have grown continuously).

Additionally, the performance data can be analyzed to find patterns. Does the QoS fall short only in certain spots or at a certain time of day? Why is this happening? We can build models of the traffic flows and run simulations to allow us to ask questions such as “Would an extra off-ramp lane prevent the exiting traffic from backing up on the Beltway?” Or “Would running an extra lane Southbound in the morning improve the traffic flows?”

Getting back to the recent Tractor-Trailer accident, has anyone done any modeling and simulation of what might happen if I-495 were blocked by an accident - - or a terrorist action? Do we have alternate routes identified? Do we have the computer systems to redirect traffic to these alternate routes and to dynamically change the traffic patterns on certain roads to facilitate the flow in traffic in what may be abnormal ways?

If you’d like to voice your opinion about the traffic situation in your city, fill in our on-line questionnaire "Traffic Survey" Disclaimer: This is not intended to be a scientific, randomized survey, and I make no claim to its validity. However, I will publish the results in a future blog, if we get enough interest in the poll.

Give me your thoughts on how analytics might be used to improve our traffic situation. Write to me at ascdc@us.ibm.com or respond to this blog.

-Frank Stein, Director, IBM’s Analytics Solution Center

Washington, D.C.

More on Analytics at our website www.ibm.com/ASCdc

The Analytics Job Market

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The news last week was all about the weak job market. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke characterized the job market as showing “continuing weakness.” Well, guess what? The job market for those with Analytics skills is very hot. Monster has over 1000 job listings for Business Analytics jobs.

Here at IBM, we have over 100 openings for Business Analytics and Optimization jobs. Some of these are associated with our Public Sector Practice, consulting to Federal, State, and Local Governments or developing data-intensive, analytics solutions to help them perform their mission.

Why are there so many jobs in this field? Businesses and governments today must figure out how to do more with less. Organizations can analyze data coming from their business processes to develop new approaches to streamlining or even optimizing their business. In the past, many decisions involved in running an organization were based on “gut instinct.” Today, it is not longer defensible to make decisions in this way when it is possible to make “fact-based” decisions using hard data. Data stored in a Business Intelligence system can be used by every level of an organization to help staff understand their business better, detect problems, and develop solutions that will allow them to accomplish their mission better, cheaper and faster. Sophisticated analysis can be done on the data to predict what will happen if the current trends continue, determine how to achieve the best outcome, and study the impact of external uncertainties such as the economy or the weather.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in their 2010-2011 Occupational Outlook Handbook, the employment of operations research analysts is expected to grow 22 percent over the 2008-18 period. While not all analytics jobs require an operations research degree, this gives a good indication of the long term trend. We know that technology is continuing to improve both in terms of raw compute power and in the design of efficient algorithms to analyze and optimize solutions. This increasing capability will drive the demand to add “smarts” to many more systems and processes, and will drive the need for analysts who can apply the technology. So analytics isn’t just a good short term career choice, but a good target for long-term career growth.

To do these jobs, though, requires in-depth skills and knowledge. Skills in operations research (OR) techniques, data mining, optimization, decision theory, and data analysis are needed, along with some background in IT systems. The ideal candidate will also have some domain knowledge about government or business functional areas since it is very hard to apply the mathematical techniques in abstraction.

How to Find Analytics Jobs

Most Analytics jobs aren’t listed under “analytics” and many won’t even come up under that keyword. Use search terms like ‘business intelligence,” “performance management,” “optimization,” and “operations research.” If you have experience with actual analytics software such as Cognos, SPSS, Intelligent Miner, or ILOG, both Monster and IBM’s website return hits on those keywords.

Want to learn more about jobs at IBM in Business Analytics?

Go to www.ibm.com/employment and click on the “Search for Jobs at IBM” link

You may also write me at ASCdc@us.ibm.com

Regards, Frank Stein Analytics Solutions Center of Washingtion, D.C. Director

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