THE RECENT row over remarks by Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton about welfare being “a lifestyle choice” would never have happened if the right technology had been in place, claims EMC country manager Jason Ward.
Data analytics should replace anecdotal or unscientific evidence with hard facts that could better inform government policy, he said.
“The government admitted that it does not have the capacity to minutely analyse a raft of social services information to identify flaws in the system,” he added. “The technology is at a place where you can marry lots of data from different sources in one small appliance, allowing public and private sector organisations to carry out detailed analysis.”
The trends technology can uncover would give the public sector the information it needs to track changes in social needs, according to Ward. “More detailed information would help government to better target public policy instruments and more efficiently spend scarce public resources.”
Data analytics and business intelligence have long been pushed by the tech sector as a missing link in the way organisations run their businesses, but extracting useful information from disparate databases has been a complex and expensive process. That’s all changed, claims EMC.
Last year the company acquired Greenplum, a disruptive data warehousing technology which offers organisations self-service analytics at 20 to 30 per cent of the cost of traditional solutions, according to Mr Ward. “Rather than having to spend huge volumes of cash on new infrastructure, these appliances are much more efficient and performance-focused. Some solutions take a couple of weeks to run a query, whereas Greenplum can take it down to hours or even minutes.”
Ever since the health service’s ill-fated personnel, payroll and related systems (PPARS) human resources project, the Department of Finance has run more rigorous controls over information technology procurement, but Ward believes new technologies such as Greenplum tick the right boxes. He also detects a new enthusiasm for technology as a way to help the public sector “do more with less”.
“There has been a sea change, and the Department of Finance is doing a great job now in looking at innovation and openness to support the Government in transformation and driving efficiency.”
