JOURNAL OF ADvANCED ANALyTICS

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4Q 2O12

PuBlIC sECtor InnovAtIon

Journal of Advanced Analytics

whats in this issue

Public sector agencies bear a heavy responsibility. With aging populations, rising unemployment (particularly among the young), and spiraling deficits, we have a toxic mix of challenges that could lead to civic unrest. Recent technological advances, however, hold the promise of a brilliant future. With analytics we can transform the beginning of the end to the end of the beginning and offer a beginning of inclusive growth. From solving unemployment problems, to monitoring the safety of roadways, analytics helps government leaders make better decisions. Today, as the size of our problems increases and the amount of data available also grows, delivering useful analytics on time and on budget is more important than ever.

4Q 2O12
Editorial Director Mikael Hagstrom mikael.hagstrom@sas.com Editor-in-Chief Alison Bolen alison.bolen@sas.com Managing Editor Anne-Lindsay Beall anne-lindsay.beall@sas.com Copy Editors Amy Dyson Chris Hoerter Amy Madison Trey Whittenton Editorial Contributors Andrea Acton Gail Bamford Robert Fildes Rebecca Garcia Barry Gay Robert Kirkpatrick Allan Manning Ian Manocha Michael Pidd Helne Spjuth Katrina Wakefield Ed Walker Art Direction Brian Lloyd Photography John Fernez Steve Muir

Intelligence Quarterly is published quarterly by SAS Institute Inc. Copyright 2012 SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved. Limited copies may be made for internal staff use only. Credit must be given to the publisher. Otherwise, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission of the publisher. SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 60,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW.

2 Big analytics for inclusive growth

Building a better future with advanced analytics

The public sector is facing a period of monumental strain as governments around the world attempt to reduce huge budget deficits. Yet even as budget reduction efforts are taking place, demands on public services have never been higher, and these demands will only continue to increase as populations grow, age and diversify. Meanwhile, climate change, natural disasters, system complexity, global risks and socioeconomic challenges grow at an ever-increasing rate, and international terrorism further complicates public sector planning and priorities. None of these issues are new, but the complexity, interrelations, global dependencies and growth rates of the issues are unprecedented. While the private and public sectors have been wrestling to increase efficiency for many years, the critical need to reduce

government debts of unprecedented sizes is more urgent than ever before. As a result, the opportunity to use advanced analytics in government has never been greater and the need for social insight has never been more critical. Fact is, 90 percent of the worlds data that exists today did not exist two years ago. A constrained government cannot afford to ignore 90 percent of the available data assets by continuing to use an outdated analytics strategy. A big analytics strategy can pave the way for the beginning of a new and digital world. And high-performance analytics will make history in the era of inclusive growth, defined as an era that involves the broadest possible spectrum of people in wealth creation.

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PREDICT AND PREvENT Overall, the new world of big data and high-performance analytics promises to give public sector organizations the opportunity to use their data to predict and prevent rather than fail and fix. The fail-and-fix method is all too common across the public and private sectors today. For example: We recognize where fraud has occurred, and then only after millions of dollars have been lost we set out to close the loophole that allowed it to occur. We identify an unprecedented risk to which our business has been exposed, and then only after the entire system has nearly collapsed we set out to manage the risks more thoroughly. We diagnose our citizens with lifethreatening diseases that are often accompanied by potentially fatal comorbidities, and then only after their bodies have almost entirely shut down we set out to fight those diseases without addressing the causes of poor health in the first place. There is a better way. Using advanced analytics to predict and prevent allows our leaders to recognize and identify the conditions for fraud, risk and poor health and many other concerns much earlier in the process. With this knowledge, changes can be made and programs can be created that prevent the fraud, risk and diseases from occurring. With these insights, public sector programs can ultimately have a much greater impact on the overall health of the region. It is only through high-performance analytics that technology of any kind can meet the 21st century needs of governmental and social intelligence. This issue of Intelligence Quarterly offers many examples of how the predictand-prevent concept can meet the immediate demands for cost-cutting while contributing to longer-term transformational objectives, including: A recent study from the United Nations Global Pulse that uses linguistic analytics to demonstrate how government agencies can harness data from social media to help formulate policies to address joblessness before unemployment rates grow beyond control (page 7). Any government thats not using social intelligence now soon will be. Instead of waiting years to identify income tax fraud and then trying without success to recover back taxes, HM Revenue & Customs in the UK uses analytics to predict and prevent fraud. The project has an anticipated ROI of 7 billion and also promises to improve the quality service provided to taxpayers (page 18). Rather than calculating average demands for military equipment, military leaders are using forecasts to better predict spikes in demand that more accurately reflect the readiness needs of the military to reduce expenses and win wars (page 34). DATAS INFLUENCE ON THE FUTURE Most public sector agencies are still in the early stages of information management implementations, using historical data to report and influence decisions. But we live in unprecedented times, so we can no longer rely on understanding the past to guide us in the future. Instead, government leaders should move toward using data for insight, enabling the public sector to predict and prevent so that their operations are more efficient. To reduce deficits and improve citizen services, all government agencies must develop the agility to optimize their performance for today but also to anticipate the challenges of tomorrow. Big data has a much bigger role to play in these efforts than simply advancing the effectiveness of cost-cutting programs and reporting structures. Indeed, big analytics can be the step-change needed to transform public sector services into the efficient, effective programs that citizens deserve. What water was to prosperity in the past and oil is in current times, data is about to become with one very fundamental difference: If we treat data as the new asset class, it can help reduce conflict and tension instead of proliferating discord, for it exists in abundance.

Read Mikael Hagstroms blog: blogs.sas.com/mikaelhagstrom

online

As head of an expanding global team of 4,500 professionals in 48 countries, Mikael Hagstrom is passionate about providing a culture where innovation can ourish, resulting in market leadership for the organization and its customers. He leads SAS Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia Paci c regions, which accounted for 54 percent of SAS 2011 revenue, or $1.47 billion.

4 A road map to public sector reform

The smart way to cut costs, optimize performance and deliver reform in the public sector

From health and welfare to safety and security, analytics is improving society in many ways. Consider these examples from the UK:  The London Fire Brigade has integrated external data with its own data to apply predictive analytics and optimize performance in areas where there is a high risk of fire.  The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) has transformed its performance since investing in predictive analytics to reduce costs and risks, increasing revenues and improving customer service.  The Croydon Drug and Alcohol Action Team is sharing data across multiple agencies and using an insight-driven

approach to improve prioritization and risk management in treatment programs.  National Health Service Blood and Transplant has used analytics to optimize decisions and to understand the multiple factors that influence survival rates, waiting times and donor consent.  A defense organization uses predictive analysis to generate scenarios and predict future logistics and supply chain requirements at macro and brigade levels.  A joint program between HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and The National Fraud Authority (NFA) is using advanced analytics to fight fraud and

error by identifying existing fraud and predicting where it may occur next. The above examples give a glimpse of how SAS Analytics can underpin a smarter, more preventative approach to reforming public services and optimizing performance, even in the face of budget cuts. Each organization is at a different stage of its journey, but they all are united by their adoption of better information management practices to improve efficiency and protect frontline services. Drawing on its extensive experience of both good and bad practices, the National Audit Office (NAO) has compiled a guide to structured cost reduction. Central to its argument is that a lack of information and poor planning are the primary causes of waste in the public sector. This poor,

A lack of information and poor planning are the primary causes of waste in the public sector. The NAO report urges the public sector to adopt a longer-term, data-driven strategy instead.

ill-informed planning, it says, is the root of short-term, indiscriminate cost cutting that can lead to higher overall spending or just move the costs elsewhere and can leave organizations exposed and unprepared for the future. The report urges the public sector to adopt a longer-term, data-driven strategy instead. It suggests that this approach is vital to ensure that government departments have the information to perform optimally today and in the future, and recommends embedding continuous improvement and efficiency into business as usual, not just as a response to budget constraints. The NAO acknowledges that the execution of such strategies will involve investing in technologies that improve the capability to understand and compare costs, and to conduct comprehensive risk assessments. It also recommends the use of analytical frameworks to understand cost and value drivers, and proactively influence future demand. Finally, the report stresses the importance of adopting this approach systemwide, rather than in departmental silos. But how can the public sector afford these essential investments and ensure buy-in across multiple departments? The examples above and others like them share some common lessons and provide some clues to success. Quantify: The vital first step is to gain senior-level commitment to exploring the opportunities and benefits available as well as the risks involved with retaining the status quo. A catalyst for this change is often a call to action, such as the budget crisis, combined with the recruitment of senior managers or nonexecutives with experience in the private sector who understand the benefits of improved information management. For example, leaders in the NFA committed to the

change to fight fraud simply because the size of the prize had been quantified. Demonstrate: Buy-in is often achieved through senior executive workshops, which bring the benefits of analytics to life. VOSA made its breakthrough when SAS delivered a proof of concept data challenge, in which real data was integrated and analyzed, providing some surprising insights to the board within just one week of implementation. With SAS support, HMRC created a Data Lab that spread best practices and promoted greater use of predictive analytics across HMRC and the wider government. It is often useful to identify the information and applications that will provide the biggest win in the short term, as part of a longer-term approach. Benchmark: Workshops should involve learning from best practices in other industries. SAS helped the NFA set its benchmarks with information from numerous customers across banking, insurance and the public sector. Similarly, SAS runs a range of forums and events to encourage this practice as standard. CulturaI shift: The leadership teams that have done the most to optimize performance in the shortest time often share a few common light-bulb moments:  Go the extra mile: Business intelligence was originally adopted to comply with mandatory reporting and legal requirements, but it has come a long way since then. The first step to reform is often making a virtue out of necessity by realizing the enormous potential of management information to transform the very performance that is being reported.

Prevention is better than the cure: The next stage is recognizing the importance of foresight and its strategic advantage over hindsight. The adoption of SAS proactive predict-and-prevent approach has already been critical to optimizing the performance of limited resources: transforming productivity, increasing revenues and improving public safety. Birds of a feather stick together: Organizations spend a lot of time differentiating their products and services to gain a competitive advantage. All too often this mindset trickles over into software procurement decisions and leads to organizations investing in expensive, bespoke solutions sometimes referred to as the cost of being special. But the realization that the organization is not unique, and that many others in the private and public sectors have been wrestling with the same fundamental problems, is crucial. Once decision makers accept this reality and adopt commercial off-the-shelf analytics solutions and processes, they can revel in much lower implementation costs and faster ROI. Coordinate and share: Many SAS customers are realizing the benefits of linking with other organizations within the same ecosystem to share experiences and explore systemwide benefits. For example, HMRC and DWP have agreed on a joint counterfraud strategy and are establishing a shared risk and intelligence unit. Meanwhile, others have enriched internal data with external data to provide a more holistic view and even greater predictive capacity. Audit: Successful reform starts with understanding what information your organization has, where that information is, who holds it, its condition, and its

issues and gaps. The SAS white paper Valuing Information as an Asset is a great place to begin; it outlines how to create an information asset register and includes research into the rationale and business benefits of Business Analytics Competency Centers (BACCs). Build trust: Information must be cleaned and integrated to demonstrate its value and to build confidence throughout an organization. A large UK police force adopted a quick-win approach to demonstrate the operational benefits of improved data quality. In less than a year, it made amazing strides: from having one borough in 32 being rated as excellent and 14 rated as poor, to none being rated as poor and 14 as excellent. Consolidate: Better business intelligence allows organizations to consolidate information management staff and tools thereby reducing duplication and exposing gaps in resources. For example, vOSAs new advanced analytics software saved the agency enough money on information gathering that it practically paid for itself. The key here is adopting a long-term solve-and-evolve model, rather than a rip-and-replace approach, i.e., exploiting existing business intelligence software investments. Tools can then be gradually rationalized toward a fully integrated and agile predictive analytics system. Partner: To reduce initial costs and overcome a skills shortage, public sector agencies should seek best-in-class private sector partners. This partnership could involve shared services or an as-needed software as a service relationship. Or agencies could follow the example of HMRC and DWP, which explored risk/ reward partnerships, based on increased

revenues generated by reducing tax evasion and benefits fraud. Create centers of excellence: Once businesses have accepted the importance of improved information management, many also agree on the need for a new governance and organizational model, leading to the creation of a dedicated Information Management Center of Excellence. This is a business-oriented, rather than IT-oriented, organization, whose goals are to create the information evolution road map, oversee its execution, and help the wider organization understand and exploit the information as an asset. Given the shortage of skills, tools and funds in the public sector, it is recommended that smaller to medium-sized organizations pool resources and share these centers of excellence. This list could be regarded as an evolutionary path to performance optimization and increased efficiency. As the case studies have demonstrated, it is a journey worth making with many experienced practitioners to guide the way. It is also a journey that, increasingly, public sector organizations will have no choice but to make if they are to deliver the frontline services taxpayers deserve and expect.
NAO, A Short Guide to Structured Cost Reduction 2010 www.nao.org.uk!publications/1011/structured_cost_reduction.aspx

Read the full Analytics for Government white paper: sas.com/iq-govanalytics

online

7 how CAn twEEts AffECt PolICy DECIsIons?

Global Pulse Director explains how to predict societal changes and create effective policies in real time by analyzing social data

LEADING INDICATORS

UNEMPLOYMENT

Downgrading automobile

Decreased grocery spending

Increased use of public transportation

Recently, SAS teamed up with the United Nations Global Pulse on a unique research project entitled Unemployment Through the Lens of Social Media. This project investigates how social media and online user-generated content can be used to enrich the understanding of the changing job conditions in the US and Ireland. It analyzed the moods and topics discussed in unemployment-related conversations from the open social web and then compared them to official unemployment statistics. The analysis revealed that increased chatter about cutting back on groceries, increasing use of public transportation and downgrading ones automobile could, indeed, predict an unemployment spike. After a spike, surges in social media conversations about such topics as canceled vacations, reduced health care spending, and foreclosures or evictions shed light on lagging economic effects. Such information could be invaluable for policymakers trying to mitigate negative effects of increased unemployment. In this recent interview, SAS Executive vP Mikael Hagstrom discussed the studys implications with Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse. The conversation covers everything from real-time data to data privacy, and how this type of information could be used to influence and analyze the results of public policy decisions almost immediately. hagstrom: Understanding unemployment is one of the biggest challenges for any

SPIKE

LAGGING INDICATORS
F s clo ore ure

Increased foreclosures and evictions

Analysis of social media using SAS shows increases in chatter about certain topics that are leading and lagging indicators of a spike in unemployment.

Reduced health care spending

Increased vacation cancellations

government. Are there any ways that you feel governments can address unemployment differently by using this type of information? What is the value of having big data and predicting unemployment spikes? Kirkpatrick: This was really powerful from a UN perspective because the work that was done is actually comprised of two different types of analysis: the prediction of unemployment spikes based on mood analysis before the event and the impacts of unemployment. In other words, you have early-warning capabilities, but you can also look back on this data for insights that are essential to understand future vulnerabilities. hagstrom: What is your definition of big data and why do you care about it and big analytics? Kirkpatrick: The IT departments definition of big data hasnt really changed because its simply about the storage and processing power and transport, yet the term is being used to refer to an incredible diversity of data types. So I think for us, big data is data about human behavior. I heard the term big behavior last week when I was talking to a behavioral psychologist who works in analytics. That interests me as a term to describe

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the real-time capabilities of big data analytics that can provide new insights into human behavior. Data that can give us a real-time picture of changes in human behavior is something that we have never had before. The real-time analytics provides capabilities that allow us to make a decision fast enough to change the outcome. This is the most important aspect, but real-time is relevant. Real-time detection of malnutrition could be measured in months; real-time detection of an Ebola outbreak can be measured in days; real-time detection of a natural disaster can be measured in a matter of hours. Were trying to fix outcomes, and realtime analytics is what helps us do that. When we did the work, we found significant differences between the US and Ireland in terms of how their populations were affected. In the US, we worry about losing our houses. In Ireland, you dont have that worry. But in Ireland there was significant discussion about people canceling travel plans. So if you are a government for a country where you knew unemployment spikes tended to lead to an impact on your tourism industry, you can use the lead time to predict unemployment spikes, as well as the lag time three months after an unemployment spike to predict a drop in tourism. You now know that in six months, you will need to take steps to protect the tourism industry. These are rudimentary models, but there is tremendous potential. That project is an initial proof of concept, so now we really need to start building on this foundation to develop it into a reliable methodology. Hagstrom: Based on your experience, how can you see this leading to the more preventive type of application that you mentioned? Kirkpatrick: Whats powerful about these data sources is that they are real-time, which means its not about a linear process of detecting something and then initiating a response. The monitoring doesnt stop there; it is continuous. The real application is to initiate a response and evaluate the effectiveness of the response. And if that response didnt have the desired outcome, you can make changes very quickly. Its really about faster feedback for results. Its a much more agile and adaptive approach to public policy. Hagstrom: Lets assume for a moment that there had been the possibility to predict, from early indicators, how the events in Syria were likely to unfold. Do you foresee a future where technology can help quantify measures and build a case around risk that would enable earlier decisions that would lead to less damage and a greater chance of preventing the crisis from even occurring? Kirkpatrick: The short answer is, yes. Populations that have never had a voice before now have a voice. Theyre communicating publicly and theyre sharing in real time what happens in their lives. Conflict and early warning arent areas that fall within Global Pulses scope of work. But it certainly is the case that precursors of conflict are the familiar challenges of inclusion and poverty, hunger and disease, and issues of discrimination. These are very much issues that we are looking at. So there is certainly the potential in these new data sources to have a better and earlier warning of when a situation is escalating. The real question is, how will the information be used? Weve got UN colleagues who are very interested in understanding the issues that are facing the Middle East and

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North Africa right now and how they can be more attentive and provide the best assistance using these new tools. Hagstrom: How can big analytics help Global Pulse keep international development on track and serve the worlds most vulnerable populations? Kirkpatrick: Ill give you two answers. At the highest level, its about this agile and adaptive approach. Were getting feedback on whether what were doing is working, which is going to let us have the best possible impact from a targeting standpoint. Its going to let us have a positive impact sooner, in addition to being more cost-effective in an age where theres not much development aid out there. At the tactical level, what does it mean for a development practitioner? What I envision is a world where checking socioeconomic conditions in a community will be as easy as checking the weather. Right now, I can log on to any weather website and see current information such as wind speed, temperature and barometric pressure. I can get analytics about the current trends and where things appear to be headed, and I can even have early warning alerts sent to me if the sensors detect certain patterns like rotating clouds. Checking on socioeconomic conditions should be just as easy. Hagstrom: Do you think that analytics can help policymakers be better informed and make more up-to-date policies? Kirkpatrick: Yes, I think the challenge for policymakers over the next decade is learning how to operationalize the integration of these new, real-time data sources with the traditional work flows and data that they already base decisions on. When youre dealing with real-time data, however, theres a

Improved policies based on social data

by Robert Kirkpatrick These days, people tell social networks things they wouldnt even tell their doctors. By analyzing volumes of comments on social media, we can, for example, predict a spike in unemployment in a given geography. Granted, this data reflects some very complex phenomena and human behaviors that have social, political and environmental dimensions so I must note that causality is elusive. However, think about these examples of social chatter and how the information contained in the comments could aid the society at large. Societal Category EMPLOYMENT Trends found in social media data
 Im a business major and havent been able to find a job. I may need to move to Jakarta to find one.  I stood in line for 2 hours trying to get rice today and then found out I was unqualified for the government subsidy program.  Seems like everyone is sick with the flu.

Decision Improved policy

Public sector organizations focused on skills training and job placement in Jakarta begin offering more services. Government may need to revisit qualification criteria and/or take other measures to help people in need get available assistance. Health organizations can get a head start on anticipating flu season and preparing vaccines. The UN and other agencies get an idea of how well certain programs are working; they can target resources to specific areas to increase probability of meeting a goal.

PROGRAMS FOR THE POOR

HEALTH EPIDEMIC

EFFECTIVENESS OF PROGRAMS AND SERVICES; PROGRESS RELATED TO MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDG)

 Where is the doctor at this 24/7 clinic? Its 3pm on Thurs.

These are just a few ways this kind of data can affect critical decisions if properly analyzed. However, lets not discount the value of traditional statistics, which are precise and thorough. The unstructured data found in social networks is new; its complimentary. Theres a trade-off between accuracy and speed. Unstructured data is less accurate but faster, sometimes in orders of magnitude faster. But the question remains: How can you use it?

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were trying to fix outcomes, and real-time analytics is what helps us do that.
tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Is this a blip, an anomaly or the beginning of a trend? So the challenge is helping policymakers develop the practices that are going to let them understand what kinds of decisions they can make based on real-time data and where they need to look for more information. hagstrom: What are your thoughts on data privacy with regard to these data sources? Kirkpatrick: At Global Pulse, we recognize that protecting the vulnerable means fully protecting their privacy, without exception. This entire enterprise must be about experimenting with these new types of data and tools to understand what is possible without compromising privacy. Discussing data privacy is a very polarizing event. It seems to come down to a struggle between those who believe that privacy is dead and those who believe that any reuse of data without explicit consent is dangerous. We see an opportunity to bring to the discussion a recognition that data can be used for public good, but that means there is no simple black or white framework we can use to treat all big data. Were going to have to grapple with different kinds of data to answer different problems and develop methodology to protect privacy on a case-by-case basis. But we need to create the space to experiment and learn, and that requires shifting the debate. In our case, Global Pulse is looking at big data and analytics for policy responses. So our level of interest is whats happening at the community level. Its not about understanding the specifics of an individual who lost his job and had to sell his assets to survive. Its about discovering that a lot of people in a hard-hit community are trying to sell livestock at an odd time of year, recognizing what that means and finding ways to help. hagstrom: Was there anything that surprised you about the findings or about what you could do with analytics? Was anything validated from your initial expectations? Kirkpatrick: We found what we had hoped to find: When peoples needs change, the way they use digital services change, depending on whats actually happening at the household level. We also found something that was unexpected: There are insights in these new digital data sources that we cant get any other way. That is what is incredibly exciting. Statistics can tell us when people are losing their jobs, but statistics cant tell us how thats changing peoples lives. hagstrom: So whats next for Global Pulse? What other societal challenges can you tackle now? Kirkpatrick: Weve started work in Indonesia with a number of partners, including SAS, looking at two areas. One is food security, which is tied to youth unemployment and migration to cities. Were facing challenges all over the world with urbanization, and weve realized that we do not have a good understanding of what happens economically to the people who are in urban environments. But these new data sources provide an ideal window to understanding that. We are also beginning to look at discrimination and barriers to entry into the workplace for women. We just started discussing this with the International Labour Organization to see if theres online chatter that can give us insights into why women have a difficult time entering the workforce and what sorts of challenges they encounter once they get there.

Read the Global Pulse study, Unemployment Through the Lens of Social Media: sas.com/iq-globalpulse

online

1 2 NATSEM and SAS contribute to Public Policy

The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) at the University of Canberra provides social and economic research to assist in improving public policy and providing new insights into Australian society. To enable this, NATSEM relies extensively on high-performance computing power to analyze a wide range of very complex data sources. Since NATSEM was established in 1993, it has been a reputable source of economic and social policy research for government, business and community organizations. The research conducted contributes extensively to public policy across family and community services, regional and urban modeling, wealth and housing, income and health.

Over its nearly 20 years, NATSEM has relied extensively on the analytical capabilities of SAS to provide impartial, non-biased evidence to guide policy and decision making within government. The modeling and analytical research conducted by NATSEM ranges from simple data analysis of large data sets to developing complex models of the Australian tax and transfer system. Ben Phillips, NATSEM Principal Research Fellow, says the high performance analytical capabilities provided by SAS are at the core of many of the products developed by NATSEM, offering a reliable and efficient solution. Research at NATSEM has made a significant contribution to policy development, especially in the areas of tax and

welfare policy, said Phillips. Our research has also discovered that a number of new policies have led to controversial results, often dispelling myths regarding their potential impact on Australian families. Carbon pricing makes a difference A recent NATSEM contribution to Australian public policy was around the recently introduced carbon price. Modeling the carbon price impact on households is not a simple undertaking. To gauge the impact on households, NATSEM applied predicted price impacts to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Household Expenditure Survey, which provides expenditure information for more than 600 household items. The research also considered the introduction of the compensation scheme, which included personal income tax cuts

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Our research requires drawing from a large number of data sources and bringing them together to make sense of the insights. sAs is the key enabler in getting the accuracy in the answers we need.
Ben Phillips, Principal Research Fellow, NATSEM

and the introduction of more than 100 new payments, all of which have different eligibility requirements. NATSEM used the advanced capabilities of SAS to work through the complex interactions of the carbon price and compensation scheme to identify which households were ahead and which were behind. This analysis was considered for a range of different household and family types, such as low-income and high-income households, couples, families with children and single-person households. What they found contrasted with the prevailing perception that the carbon price would increase household costs with NATSEM discovering that 70 per cent of Australian households were actually better off as a result of the carbon price legislation. The findings demonstrated that the new carbon price, in tandem with the compensation scheme, actually had a positive impact on the majority of household costs, said Phillips. While the compensation package leaves most households no worse off, the carbon price offers an incentive to shift investment and consumption away from high-pollution goods and services.

AUSTRALIAN INCOMES OUTPACE COSTS Another recent foray into public policy debate was in the AMP.NATSEM report, Prices these days! The cost of living in Australia. With increasing electricity prices being a topic of considerable public interest recently, government agencies sought an accurate view of Australian incomes and expenditures. To the surprise of many, research by NATSEM found that incomes in Australia had actually outpaced the cost of living by $224 per week over the second half of the last decade. It was found that most groups in society experienced strong gains in income beyond their respective cost of living. In developing the results, NATSEM used SAS to analyze a complex and vast range of large data sets, such as the ABS expenditure surveys going back to 1984, detailed consumer price data from the ABS Consumer Price Index publication and income data from ABS surveys. Our research draws from a large number of complex data sources, bringing them together to gain valuable insights, said

Phillips. SAS is the key enabler in getting the accuracy in the answers we need. Through its research, NATSEM has earned a reputation as a credible contributor to the social and economic policy debate, not only in Australia, but also on a global scale. SAS has been at the core of the research conducted by NATSEM and has enabled the organization to draw from the widest variety of data available and offer an evidence-based approach to guiding public policy and wider discussions.

Download the Prices These Days! report: sas.com/iq-prices

online

Improving efficiencies for community programs

As agencies combine services into one unit, analytics helps improve budgeting and reporting

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To serve its more than 4.5 million residents most effectively, the government of Queensland Australias third-most populous state must operate each department, or services stream, efficiently. So when state leaders merged five departments into one, they turned to SAS for consolidated budgeting, reporting and financial management. Following the 2009 elections, state leaders combined five formerly separate entities into a single super-department: the Department of Communities. Its four ministers and one director-general oversee services such as child safety, community and youth justice, disability, home and community care, community mental health, housing and homelessness, multiculturalism, sport and recreation as well as services for aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, seniors and women.

One of the major challenges for the new department was the standardization of its financial management systems. All five former departments had used different platforms for reporting and budgeting. After they came together, it was impossible for them to see a single, overall view a requirement to ensure ministers receive the correct data. Consistent decision support Using SAS for budgeting, reporting and financial management, the Department of Communities gains a single, standard view across all services, providing management and ministers alike the information they need to make decisions. Michael Sheehan, Director of Financial Operations and Systems at the Department of Communities, says the aim of ensuring

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all services streams were using the same system was made easier with SAS. SAS can consolidate and map data in a way that is consistent, quick and repeatable, Sheehan says. This was not something that was possible in a reasonable time using the available systems and other tools the department was using despite the people skills we had as the size, scale and complexity had our existing systems beaten. SAS helped us turn it around and deliver quickly and then scale up as required. Doing away with duplication With the departmental consolidation came data consolidation. Sheehans team used SAS to remove all the duplicate numbers assigned to the various services in the master data. There was a significant overlap between the different services-streams data, so this was not a simple process, Sheehan says. Not only did we have to eliminate the duplication in the master data, we needed to introduce consistency in all reporting hierarchies and non-master data at the lower levels. For example, the number that one services stream used for its professional development training expenses could be the same number another used for supply and services costs. When consolidating data, such doubling introduces reporting errors. Controlling the budget is one of the departments most important tasks. Unlike corporations, which can tweak their finances, we operate within a government human-services environment and generally dont charge for what we do, Sheehan says. Therefore, what we deliver needs to be delivered efficiently. Everything in unison The departments operating budget is $4.4 billion. When transferring money between divisions, it is crucial to avoid double counting, Sheehan explains. For example, if one services stream gives another $1 million, it needs to be received at the same time as it is being transferred or the budget will appear to be less than $4.4 billion, he says. The security controls that SAS has manage this. It realigns the budget in balanced parcels, so it ensures everything is done in unison. Sheehan says SAS Activity-Based Management is the best allocation tool on the market. It has the ability to take individual sectors of data down to the general-ledger account and allocate them using a driver on a consistent and reliable basis and quickly, he says. We load the data, smash it through the system and get it out within days, instead of within weeks using a manual process. Overcoming cultural issues The switch to SAS wasnt all plain sailing. Each of the former departments preferred to keep the system it already had. Sheehan says his team had to avoid sides, even if it assessed that, technically, one solution had more merit than the others. The general consensus was that we needed standardization, but everyone wanted to standardize to their own system, largely because they felt they were unique, Sheehan says. One services stream might say they were unique because they offered grants and other services streams didnt, but we explained they just needed an additional reporting tag to highlight what was relevant to them. SAS provides the flexibility required to meet the specific needs of each service,

Viewing programs holistically

A holistic view of community programs opens the possibility of answering many questions, such as:  What challenges is my community facing?  Where in the community are specific challenges arising?  What are the interrelationships among the data that help me understand these challenges?  What are the impacts of these challenges on the quality of life in my community?  What is the performance of the organization and of individual departments in addressing these challenges? Creating a holistic view of a community is an innovative approach that captures the entirety of a city or countys activity based on integrated, real-time information across all functional areas. Learn more: sas.com/iq-community

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It has given us greater accuracy and timely responses for consolidated reporting generally. If we were to wait for a consolidation of erp systems to help get information out, we still wouldnt have reports.
Michael sheehan, Director of Financial Operations and Systems, Queensland Department of Communities

Sheehan says. And it lets each service hide any items irrelevant to its operation for example, not all services need the child-protection tags. We decided each services stream could keep their existing hierarchy and load it onto SAS to produce what they would normally produce, but show them how much faster it could be done, Sheehan says. This didnt add much more to our workload, but everyone could see how impressive the results were. The department also uses SAS Financial Management, which allows as many hierarchies as needed. Though it will move to a single SAS system, the department continues using parts of the old one as employees get on board. Since going live with SAS, the department has reduced errors, and it produces reports more quickly. Its simple to change the hierarchy as needed, and the results show up immediately, Sheehan says. The implementation was fast, too, Sheehan says. The department produced its first reports within six weeks of taking its proposal to the executive board.

Updating and changing figures and loading them to SAS is done within hours, not days, Sheehan says. From a reporting perspective, changes can be made and flowed though very quickly, which also gives the department more time to find any problems and have them corrected. He says SAS has allowed two big steps to occur within the department. Its allowed for activity-based costing, which lets us automate our reports so we can get information to the service streams more quickly, Sheehan says. And it has given us greater accuracy and timely responses for consolidated reporting generally. If we were to wait for a consolidation of ERP systems to help get information out, we still wouldnt have reports.

SAS Activity-Based Management: sas.com/solutions/abm/

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Analytics helps a new government emerge
Statistics Estonia uses analytics, business intelligence to paint a national portrait

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the 1.3 million newly independent citizens of the Republic of Estonia suddenly found themselves in a position to pursue democracy, political freedom and individual economic prosperity. And one of the keys to the emerging government infrastructure was gaining a complete statistical and demographic picture of every aspect of the newly reborn nation. That task fell to Statistics Estonia, a team of 400 professionals who provide central and local governments, businesses, industry consultants, international organizations, and regular citizens with reliable and objective information on environmental, demographic, social, and economic trends and patterns throughout the country. Since the mid-1990s, dozens of Statistics Estonia employees have relied on SAS

Analytics to meet that challenge. Teams of professionals collect data, analyze it, and distribute it to various requesters. SAS plays a pivotal role in that processing, including preparing data for analysis, quality management, sampling quality checking, and more. Streamlining public sector accounting According to Elo Parveots, Lead Statistician for the National Financial and Environmental Accounts Department, before the use of SAS, analyses and reports were time-consuming to create. Previously, that meant aggregating and consolidating as many as 500,000 rows of data, meaning spreadsheets were no longer an option.

Putting the data together to analyze our public sector accounting function required us to connect to many old data sources, she says. With SAS, its taking less than half the time. So our accounting team has more time to analyze information. Statistics Estonia relies on a variety of internal data sources, including its own datacollection systems that gather information from companies and private individuals. Some of those sources include the Population Registry, Registry of Economic Activities, the Tax Registry, and the Education Registry. Collectively, they supply as much as 50-70 gigabytes of data to be analyzed.

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we can use more data. That increases what we call the quality of statistics. Our numbers are more reliable and we can give more meaningful answers to our requesters, such as politicians and analysts.
Allan randlepp, Head of Data Processing Dept., Statistics Estonia
GEARING UP FOR CENSUS One major impetus for the upgrade to SAS was to more effectively manage the countrys decennial census. We needed ways to increase the speed of our processes and do things more efficiently, explains Kaja Sstra, Head of the Methodology Department. We were anticipating very large data volumes. We felt it would be more efficient to standardize, synchronize, and put things onto a single platform. SAS has the data mining and deep-analysis capabilities we needed and the integration with other systems. And the major advantage of SAS is that its graphical, says Parveots. you dont have to know how to write code, and you can learn the basics quickly. This data will be much more detailed and that gives us the opportunity to do more comparisons, cross-analysis, and other kinds of data exploration. INCREASED PRODUCTIvITy, FASTER RESULTS Because Statistics Estonia is a government agency, productivity and efficiency are critical. We all work for taxpayers, says Sstra. The more effective we are in reducing manual work, the more that our taxpayers benefit. In some of our applications, weve seen manual work drop as much as 70 percent. In other areas, the time to complete tasks has been cut in half. Were publishing our analyses and results much faster. The team also noted that the greater speed means Statistics Estonia can review more information with deeper data sets. We can use more data, says Randlepp. That increases what we call the quality of statistics. Our numbers are more reliable and we can give more meaningful answers to our requesters, such as politicians and analysts. For Statistics Estonia, the benefits are clear. Our census project is very big, of course, so the gains there are substantial, Randlepp says. Were using SAS to collect and process this data and the alternatives would have been much more expensive. We conservatively estimate that weve saved more than 1 million euros (US$1 .29 million) by choosing to work with SAS. It is an open platform and runs on open servers that integrate easily.

SAS Estonia: sas.com/estonia/

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preveNTINg TAX frAUd wITh ANAlyTIcs IN esTONIA

The Tax and Customs Board is another public sector agency in Estonia that uses analytics to make government more efficient. With SAS, the board can detect fraud more accurately and take better actions to prevent fraud from occurring. Every month, the board receives nearly 25,000 tax filings that require immediately evaluating a dynamic set of criteria. Before SAS, the team had to rely on hunches and gut feelings. With SAS, they now take decisive action quickly and confidently. Were identifying investigation targets, detecting risks as soon as they happen and initiating audits to get to the truth, says Anneli Nappus, Head Analyst of the Tax and Custom Boards Intelligence Department. Previously, we could only look for basic irregularities on a smaller set of filings. Now, we can ask more sophisticated questions and analyze a much broader range of filings, so we have greater and more thorough coverage and its faster, too. Read more: sas.com/success/estoniantax.html

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Recovering 7 billion in additional tax revenues

Analytics help the UK tax authority detect and prevent fraud

Like tax authorities around the world, the UKs HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) must deal with significant evasion and fraud, with the scale of criminal activity growing plus the era of big data to contend with. With the UK government allocating 917 million (about US$1 .18 billion) in this area anticipating a major return on investment in the form of 7 billion (about US$9 billion) additional tax revenues highperformance analytics plays a vital role. HMRC operates in an exceptionally complex world. It administers direct taxes such as income tax, capital gains and National Insurance contributions along with indirect taxes including VAT, stamp duty and excise. It also handles Child Benefit and Tax Credits. In this world, identifying criminal networks and fraud quickly and efficiently is critical hence HMRCs Connect system that

brings together numerous internal and external data sources to reveal hidden relationships. SAS has been part of Connect for several years. The challenge is, of course, actually detecting fraud in that we know what we know and spotting new activity can be very difficult, says Bill Cockerill, Data Analyst at HMRC. Being able to react quickly, and deal with extremely large data volumes, is the key. Technology is just one aspect of the solution, says Cockerill. We not only require effective tools to access and analyze data, we also need capable people who can use the tools effectively, and that has to be integrated within your organization. In some ways, technology is the easy part. The hard part is implementing, training your people,

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The outcome will see the government avoid significant financial losses and instead receive higher tax revenues
and ensuring you have the right structure, working environment and culture. The softer aspects around the analytics are perhaps the biggest issue. Connect meant we could put analytics where they can make the biggest difference: in the hands of analysts, tax professionals and investigators working in collaboration. A KALEIDOSCOPE OF DATA Able to search a billion records at the touch of a button, Connect has revolutionized how HMRC deals with fraud detection and prevention. Cockerill says access to an extensive repertoire of analytics is required to tackle the huge variety of fraud and evasion, including segmentation and profiling, clustering, predictive models, anomaly detection and more. Within tax evasion, we can see manipulation in tax and other kinds of electronic records. you need many different tools and methods at your disposal, because someone who may appear compliant could be revealed as noncompliant in another data set, he says. you soon realize you have a highly complex kaleidoscope of data, and how interlinked everything is, explains Cockerill. We have our traditional business rules and predictive analysis models, our watch lists, and we also exploit network analysis. And we bring in the all-important human factor to see patterns that are intuitive and then find ways to convert them into bulk analytics, so they can be used by investigators. Cockerill says the complexity of the data and the complexity of the UK tax system pose a real challenge for analytics and for analysts, too. When people join us from the private sector, from analytics in banks and insurers, say, theyre used to working in a very linear environment. So to be able to analyze all of HMRCs customers together and interacting across soft and hard links presents you with an entirely different world. CHANGING THE ANALyTICS CULTURE The outcome of HMRCs analytics and the Connect system working faster and smarter, improving detection rates and finding new opportunities for prevention and deterrence will see the government avoid significant financial losses and instead receive higher tax revenues. Were saving time for example, we can limit false positive results and avoid wasted interventions, says Cockerill. The more we know about people, the more opportunities we have to deselect them. Risks that can seem really strong are explained when you can look at networks and have far richer data to work with. That broader picture means we can ease burdens on taxpayers. Were also moving into an era of larger data sets that we want to analyze using our toolkit: tables approaching billions of rows in size. In many ways this is becoming much more about heavy lifting to get the data in shape. John Lord, also from HMRCs Data Analytics Team, says, Were applying analysis across the end-to-end risk process, rather than simply building a model and handing it over. Were talking to users all the way through to deliver a more useful product which people can actually use to meet their business needs; its a cultural thing. This approach supports HMRCs taskforce initiatives, which focus activity and resources in particular areas, such as scrap metal dealers in Scotland, bringing different parts of HMRC together to work more flexibly and develop new best practice approaches from what was learned from the outcomes. The use of analytics at HMRC is not only about fraud detection, Lord adds: Were also looking at what some people call deterrence, others talk about wider impact: What are the impacts on the wider population of different types of interventions, or perhaps on a targeted population? For example, if you have an especially bad offender, we can see what impact that might have had on others.

SAS fraud prevention: sas.com/software/security-intelligence

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2 1 Stopping bad guys with social data

Basics of social media analytics for counterterrorism specialists

It is well-known that extremist organizations have embraced the Internet for its vast and immediate worldwide reach for recruitment. In 2006, the University of Haifas Gabriel Weimann published groundbreaking research in his book Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges, and discovered approximately 4,300 terrorist-related websites affiliated with 40 active terrorist groups as defined by the US Department of State. This parallels the increasing role websites play in funneling information to all of us. As consumers spend more time using social media, it should not be surprising that extremist organizations are as well. They see social media as a primary tool for bringing together communities of interest, regardless of geographic location, and for discussing ideas in a seemingly anonymous manner.

In recent years, SAS has been working with commercial interests in the area of social media analytics, helping make sense of the vast number of conversations on the Internet to better determine how organizations are perceived. This can entail culling textual and numeric data from websites in various formats (semi-structured and unstructured), including blogs, message boards, chat rooms and other social media and social networking sites to summarize the conversations about a given topic. It involves analyzing nouns to determine relevance to a given topic and understanding the use of adjectives to determine positive, negative and neutral sentiment across many different languages. Ultimately, a variety of insights can be delivered, whether it is the trending of negative sentiment associated with a brand, detailed analysis of key phrases

that resonate among certain groups of people, or determining which individuals have the most influence in a given social network. The premise of this article is that many of the techniques used to distill the essence of online conversations for businesses serving their customers can also be applied to analyzing conversations among terrorist cells. The area of social media analytics could feasibly emerge as an indispensable counterterrorism tool by enabling proactive monitoring, analysis, and engagement through extremist social networks and associated digital properties. The Challenge: Information Overload It has become obvious that the Internet is not only the communications infrastructure of choice across the full spectrum of society; it also serves as an effective operational infrastructure for various organizations, including terrorist cells. It can be accessed from anywhere at low or no cost, knows no physical boundaries, provides the means to transfer funds, offers media-rich training to facilitated stance learning, operates in real time and is always on. And much as a system administrator has tools to understand and diagnose traffic on an internal network, businesses increasingly expect, and are realizing, similar capabilities in dealing with social media chatter. But analyzing this information includes the following challenges:  Too many websites to monitor/too much information flowing through in real time.  Messages are unstructured text, written in various languages, and subject to language nuances, such as slang, colloquialisms, abbreviations, misspellings, etc. Difficulty of determining a users identity.

 Difficulty of differentiating legitimate actors from the casual visitors.  Difficulty of seeing any trends or emerging topics due to volume, veracity and velocity of data.  Significant subject matter expertise required to understand the messages. To address these challenges, public and private organizations are turning to social media analytics. The promise of social media analytics The biggest immediate benefit companies see from social media analytics is eliminating the need to analyze social media data in a piecemeal and ad hoc fashion. Instead of logging into hundreds of discrete sites, the information is all represented in one place. Instead of a chaotic, jumbled mess of sentences, businesses can impose order, categorizing sentences on the basis of how their nouns map to specific business attributes. For example, a sentence containing a complaint about phone call wait times becomes categorized as a negative instance specific to customer service. Millions of sentences add up to millions of insights on challenges and opportunities like pricing, corporate reputation, customer loyalty and quality. As businesses have embraced the brave new world of social media analytics, there are lessons that can be applied to counterterrorism analytics. 1. Treat online conversations as information assets. Many organizations in the private sector track and archive customer activity through sales data, yet they often have no capture or archival strategy for analyzing and retaining what those customers say about the business publicly. Similarly, intelligence organizations often have detailed information on the criminal history of an

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As businesses have embraced the brave new world of social media analytics, there are lessons that can be applied to counterterrorism analytics.

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individual, yet lack the ability to connect that with public conversations As businesses have learned, what is being said online can be a leading indicator of what is about to happen to that business. Anyone who has read a negative hotel review on Expedia or a negative product review on Amazon can attest to the power of crowds to influence opinion. But the ability to link online perception to offline activities is completely undermined if those same conversations are not properly categorized as relevant to an organization, or not archived long enough for a good analyst to discover that linkage. For these reasons, the foundation of any social media analytics effort should be the collection, integration and storage of online conversations for several years of historical analysis, combined with information from internal systems to allow for deeper, more holistic insights. It is crucial to have this depth and breadth of conversation history to understand the difference between a fad and a trend. This is relevant to the counterterrorism community as well. Correctly categorizing a written reference to a known terrorist, belonging to a known terrorist cell, pre-9/1 1 in Afghanistan, is only valuable if it is actually available for analysis and is easily matched with other intelligence data. 2. Understand the sentiment of conversations linked to specific topics and issues. Understanding the Web traffic generated by specific social media activities or assessing the tone of references to a specific topic does not go far enough in helping develop insights that drive action. To begin understanding the issues, sources and trends specific to the counterterrorism mission, you must be able to select which topics, media sources and key conversations to analyze, and then choose how to classify them.

Intelligence organizations often have detailed information on the criminal history of an individual, yet lack the ability to connect that with public conversations.

In the past, the level of detail collected from online conversations was insufficient to guide important decisions. For commercial interests, it has long been difficult to accurately determine topics that were important and perceptions that were associated with a particular topic. Unable to link conversations to topics, organizations could not quantify the impact of online content on their overall performance. This is another area where social media analytics provides a critical link. In terms of counterterrorism, the sentiment analysis capability can be used to measure online reaction to changes or initiatives to specific topics, such as US foreign policy, military operations, foreign presenceand foreign aid. This effectively structures the unstructured, making public sentiment analysis possible. 3. Eliminate analyst bottlenecks. Lack of data is not the pressing issue for most intelligence professionals. It is lack of insights. Even the best data analysis is worthless if it does not reach decision makers on time with clarity. Therefore, it is critical that the very best thinking go into data visualization techniques that are designed for decision makers, not just analysts, with turnkey capabilities in sentiment trending, author analysis, threat tracking, and phrase clustering. In this way, identification of escalating issues, the most influential actors, and emerging trends and topics are delivered to those in the best position to capitalize on that information. Practical applications for counterterrorism Through the approaches described previously, there are a number of application areas that social media analytics offers counterterrorism strategies. They include: The What. Businesses expect a real-time read on social sentiment relative to their brands, and counterterrorism specialists should expect the same of the brand

of any terrorist. Understanding the key phrases, sentiment and volume of conversations encompassing specific terrorists can be an indicator of activities. the virtual where. In a world with billions of websites, simply understanding which online properties have a critical mass of disaffected, relevant people is not a trivial undertaking. Being able to consume chatter across all types of websites and determine their relevance to your organizations mission is among the most important benefits to any listening platform. the Physical where. Much of the global populations use of social media sites is driven from mobile devices, which increasingly contain coordinates of a users location. This allows organizations to begin to understand geographic characteristics of extremist chatter, and more quickly identify domestic sources of unrest. Furthermore, the Internet protocol addresses of devices connected to networks can increasingly serve as accurate sources of location based insights. the who. There is a treasure trove of information surrounding the connections between people. This can yield an organizational hierarchy of individuals that can be used to determine the more important users across the forums. the why. Connecting social insights to real events on the ground is the ultimate goal. Correlating online chatter to historical events can yield clues as to why certain chatter is noise, while other chatter can be an indication of more serious events to come. CONCLUSION In the post-9/11 world, government organizations with complex challenges would often see enormous programs created with budgets of $500 million to $1 billion awarded to large systems integrators. More recently, the administration

mandated that these enterprise programs be scaled down to much smaller projects, in an effort to reduce costs and, more importantly, to facilitate more rapidly successful solutions to critical challenges Counterterrorism organizations have to straddle technology investment that is proven and current, while staying within budget and ensuring adoption. But technology is only a means to an end; it is ultimately people who understand the specific issues inherent to counterintelligence who will ensure success. Therefore, the human intuition of experts in intelligence must inform social media analytics technology on what to look for, so that computer intelligence is better able to inform the humans about the content, correlation and trajectory of social conversations. It is only through this approach that technology of any kind can meet the 21st century needs of governmental intelligence, and perhaps is the most important prerequisite in evaluating a social media analytics effort.
This article originally appeared in IQT Quarterly, Winter 2012. volume 3, No. 3. www.iqt.org

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TUrN sOcIAl dATA INTO crIme fIghTINg INTellIgeNce

To approach social media analysis, law enforcement needs a strategy that can: Collect and process the information rapidly and accurately. Sift out the relevant information from the mass of background noise. Turn inconsistent and irregular data into intelligence about specific people, relationships, organizations, places and events. Identify patterns and connections, not just in the areas where they might already be looking for them, but also ones that are not currently on the radar. Link this information to chatter from other sources, taking into account the different levels of reliability, sensitivity, etc. Disseminate the information to those who need it, when they need it and in the format needed. Learn more about applying analytics for crime investigation and prevention: sas.com/iq-crimepaper

SAS Social Media Analytics: sas.com/iq-sma

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Rebecca Garcia is a Director at SAS Federal, where she focuses on helping the intelligence community solve mission-and IT-critical challenges. Prior to working at SAS, Garcia worked for The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, and KPMG Federal.

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Analytics informs the debate on UK health care

The Nuffield Trust conducts essential research to deliver new insights

How do you reduce emergency admissions and increase the use of telehealth services to improve overall health? One research institute in the UK uses analytics to find answers to these and other questions. Established in 1940, the Nuffield Trust is an authoritative and independent source of evidence-based research and policy analysis into health care in the UK. Its findings support health care providers, inform government decision making and are regularly featured in the media, fuelling the ongoing debate among policymakers, practitioners and the public on the future of health and social care in the UK. The trust has used SAS to provide essential analytics since 2007 .

Emergency admissions and telehealth A project involving emergency admissions provides an example of how SAS is used. Thirty-five percent of all admissions in the NHS in England are classified as emergencies, costing 11 billion (US$17.1 billion) a year. Nuffield Trust analysis shows the number of such admissions had risen by 11.8 percent from 2004 to 2009, which totals 1.35 million additional admissions costing more than 1,000 each. This research aimed to understand why this figure was rising, Adam Steventon, Senior Research Analyst. We took a national approach, analyzing data from throughout England. We used SAS to analyze different aspects across every single emergency admission. The output was a series of conclusions, including the fact that a rise in short-stay admissions (less-severe

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Our goal is to make sure health policy is informed by evidence as far as possible, and our work does lead to different decisions being taken. We are increasingly approached by organizations wanting to commission research.
Adam Steventon, Senior Research Analyst, Nuffield Trust

cases) might suggest the clinical threshold for acute admissions had been lowered. Results were widely disseminated to policymakers, NHS providers and commissioners. A more complex example involved using SAS in a large randomized control trial funded by the Department of Health. The Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) project looks at telehealth and telecare: using technology and a range of equipment to help people manage long-term conditions (such as diabetes) and their care needs in their home, and aiming to help patients maintain independence. Pilot projects had suggested you could prevent admissions and save money while actually improving clinical outcomes, quality of care and the patient experience, says Steventon. In the current economic climate, being able to quantify the benefits delivered by such approaches is more important than ever before. SAS Analytics supports this research, in particular by examining effects on actual service use: Whether it does reduce hospital or residential care admissions, as well as impacts on GPs, community nursing and so on, says Steventon. Our approach is very novel, pulling together and using very large data sets from different NHS sources, local authorities,

GPs and more, linking all this at a person level. We dont think anyone has done this before, and SAS is really good for this work size is no object. We have a reputation for robust work providing authoritative results people can rely on, says Steventon. We want to maintain that reputation, which is obviously linked to our use of SAS. Steventons team focuses on quantitative analyses working with very large data volumes, with the results used by groups ranging from ministers and senior civil servants to health service commissioners and practitioners. Were a new in-house team, established over the last few years, and some of us brought SAS experience from previous roles, he continues. We considered other providers but decided SAS was a good (preferred) solution, especially given the data volumes involved. SAS can handle a lot of data, and does so pretty quickly. And since moving SAS to the server, its astonishingly fast. Hundreds of millions of records Steventons team accesses and uses large administrative data sets from the National Health Service (NHS) and other sources, including national Hospital Episode Statistics, which covers 12 million inpatient admissions each year and many more outpatient visits. We also link together with

very novel data sets from GP practices, local authority and social care sources, he says, which is exciting because we can build pictures of how individuals interact with the health and social care system over a number of years. As a result, the Nuffield Trust has very large data volumes it is keen to explore to answer a range of research questions. Some projects require hundreds of millions of records, from multiple sources and in different formats, from several hundred providers, Steventon adds. We clean all that data and link it together at the person level. SAS provides the flexibility to challenge, query and check analyses using a variety of methods. Another thing we like about SAS is having the ability to write our own macros and commands. Most of the analytics are already available in SAS, but some more sophisticated ones arent provided as pre-written functions, so we can write our own. Were a small team. Since we often collaborate on projects together, we also need good audit capabilities to produce data sets other people can understand and use, and to keep records of how they were derived. SAS enables all that.

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ANAlyTIcs prOvIdes TOOls fOr mOre effecTIve reseArch
For years doctors and hospitals across Australia have been collecting information on various diseases and the way in which they are diagnosed and treated for the purposes of research. Most of this information is stored within individual databases. Using analytical tools from SAS, BioGrid Australia provides the technology to link anonymous patient information from these different databases in a way that maintains the privacy of the patient and the security of the information. One area where BioGrid has been instrumental is with the national bowel screening program, where people aged between 50 and 70 are offered a free test every five years. Researchers at BioGrid were able to analyze data from more than 1,200 bowel cancer patients from 19 sites around Australia. The analysis indicated that early diagnosis of bowel cancer not only reduced the cost of treatment per patient but also improved the chances of survival. A future area of interest for BioGrid is co-morbidity the effect of one or more diseases on a patient in addition to his or her primary disease. A cancer patient, for example, may have a number of co-morbidities, such as hypertension or diabetes, and given drugs for all of them, says BioGrid Chief Executive Maureen Turner. There has been little research on how to effectively treat patients with multiple diseases. Using data available through BioGrid, researchers might find the same patient presenting for different diseases at different institutions and be able to analyze these data further. Turner adds SAS data analysis capabilities would be instrumental in cross-referencing information on multiple diseases and reporting trends.

With analytical rigor and research quality taking precedence over speed, there are still opportunities to work rapidly: to deliver timely, thus more relevant, feedback for health care providers and other interested parties. We have regular data feeds and fresh input monthly, so we use that to update some analyses, Steventon says. This is particularly important for our evaluation work. For example, one part of the UK may be doing something innovative to prevent hospital admissions, which are undesirable to the individual and are costly; its highly useful for the trust to evaluate outcomes quickly and efficiently to give people on the ground as up-to-date a picture as possible. HAvING AN IMPACT Steventon adds, We track the success of our research, and our work has an impact on health policy development and commissioning. Our goal is to make sure health policy is informed by evidence as far as possible, and our work does lead to different decisions being taken. We are increasingly approached by organizations wanting to commission research. The big advantages of being able to use the administrative data sets are the sets national coverage, their standardization and the fact that they cover long periods, 10 years in some cases, says Steventon. Were exploring how we can use our analytics to help more and more NHS commissioners to evaluate their own pilot programs, drawing on the data at our disposal. Were being approached to do a lot more evaluations because people trust us.

Read the health care blog, A Shot in the Arm: blogs.sas.com/content/hls

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Improving quality and lowering costs in health care

Stockholm County Council increases efficiencies with shared skills and shared data

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Stockholm County Council (SLL) uses several different SAS solutions for analysis and reporting to improve health care outcomes, reduce government costs and improve citizen welfare. To become even more efficient, the council conducted a successful consolidation project with help from SAS partner BearingPoint. As a result, all units within SLL now have access to shared information, shared skills and a common interface. The consolidation has lowered SLL costs and was kept within predetermined budgets and time frames. SLL is Swedens second-largest public organization in terms of budgetary framework and staff, employing more than 40,000 people. The councils main responsibilities are for the public health care system and public transport, with three quarters of its budget going to health care (including dental care). It

is a complex organization with boards and administrations that are responsible for planning and providing publicly founded health care services. The SLL has used analytics and reporting solutions from SAS since the late 1 980s. Initially, they had different administrations, and the separate departments had separate installations for each application. Because the SLL was pleased with SAS, it decided to create a common operating environment to take even more advantage of SAS solutions. It is a great advantage that the entire organization now has access to all analytical solutions, says Gran Lord, Analyst in the Development Department at The Public Healthcare Services Committee and Administration (HSNf), SLL. The joint portal (called GUPS) covers the SLLs need

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Providing health care for all

When catastrophic illness strikes families in Andhra Pradesh, India, paying for quality care neednt add to their worries. The Aarogyasri Health Care Trust meets the total health care needs for poor families in Andhra Pradesh, a state of 85 million people. Combining public-health infrastructure with the private sectors medical expertise, the Aarogyasri trust is on a mission to improve and provide quality in all areas of health care. It is tailored to the health needs of poor patients, providing end-to-end cashless services for identified diseases through a network of public and private providers. The Aarogyasri trust relies on predictive analytics to measure performance and keep expenses down. Claims, financial and clinical data are used in forecasts that ultimately root out fraud, spot disease trends, and lead to preventive health measures. By understanding disease trends, Aarogyasri can redefine its coverage packages and negotiate better prices with insurers. At the same time, it can continue efforts to eliminate pre-existing disease load among catastrophic cases. As disease trends improve, so do premium costs, thus extending the trusts ability to cover even more diseases.

to collect, analyze and report data for planning and monitoring needs, volume, quality and effectiveness of health care. Users of the information include purchasing officials, pharmaceutical centers, hospitals and other care providers. There are dozens of applications available to easily access health care consumption data, health care provider analysis, quality of life measurements, drug monitoring, clinical studies and more. When all units had their own databases, the information on the databases was not available for the other departments. Possibly, they could get reports delivered as a PowerPoint or Excel document. Now all information is accessible from a common analysis portal, and updates need only be made in one place, says Ivan Labb-Reyna, SAS Officer of SLL IT. The consolidation project has been very successful and exceeded expectations. We got a good platform both within the budget and on time. There were periods of problems, for example in connection with people that left the project, but I am proud that we were stubborn and chose to continue to invest, said Labb-Reyna. In connection with the consolidation project, SLL started an administrative board with representatives from the separate departments that use the GUPS, giving important coordination between the different departments. The Administrative Board meets every two weeks. A more regular contact between all users of the platform allows us to easily share knowledge and learn from each others experience, says Lord.

so far, sll reports total savings of several million swedish krona.

Two critical success factors were that the project had support from the county management and that the teams responsible for the day-to-day business were in the driving seat of the project, says Labb-Reyna. The driving force has been to find synergies, to share skills and have a common architecture and management. Previously we needed several system managers and five to six different servers. Today, it is easy for all devices that are not yet connected but want to take advantage of the common analysis portal to join the GUPS based on existing permissions, says Per yhde from BearingPoint, project manager for the consolidation project. Consolidation has also led to the streamlining of support services. So far, SLL reports total savings of several million Swedish krona. GUPS also adds quality assurance of data since SLL has eliminated manual procedures, and all changes now take place in one place.

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JOINT mONITOrINg pOrTAl ImprOves fOllOw-Up cAre

How is society benefiting from the new SAS analytics platform in place at Stockholm County Council (SLL)? One early project is the Joint Monitoring Portal, which was built to streamline and improve the quality of follow-up care. The monitoring portal provides users with a number of options for reporting and analysis, most of which are constructed by the development department at SLL. Customized tools for different groups of users make it easier for experts to obtain relevant information. Reports include provider comparisons, health care consumption analysis, quality monitoring, medication monitoring, clinical trials and some diagnostic follow-up (such as medical informatics for rheumatology). There will be more to come as needed. Data and reporting are access-controlled for each individual user, not only to control information but also to facilitate the user. Information that is most relevant to a user group is made available immediately at login. This means the user should be only three clicks away from the desired information. Other parts of the information are completely public, which supports the recent trend toward open comparisons of quality of care and providers. The public areas are exported to the Web-based Health Care Guide, where they can be accessed by citizens. The information there will be expanded and tailored to different needs. This information is tailored, for example for a provider comparison tool, and can be used as the basis for citizens free choice of health care provider.

SAS Sweden: sas.com/sweden/

online

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Innovation and management control for healthier hospital governance

Health Care Director explains the benefits of analytics

In Genoa, Italy, the people say a good reputation is worth more than a million. That sentiment is reflected in the philosophy at San Martino Regional Hospital, a leading provider of comprehensive health care services for metropolitan Genoa and Liguria. Since 1422, San Martino Regional Hospital has drawn patients from all over Italy and around the world. A prominent center of excellence for cardiac and neurologic surgery and care, hematology, transplants and emergency care, the hospital averages 80,000 inpatient admissions, 8 million outpatient cases, and 100,000 emergency-ward visits a year. So its no surprise that managing clinical risk is a critical component of San Martinos mission. Without reliable risk models for each department and operational unit, the

hospital corporation would see enormous increases in insurance costs. Extensive process redesign reduces the risk and cost of errors related to the preparation and delivery of care and prescription medications. IT systems, therefore, represent a point of strength for the company, and the choice of advanced technologies has positioned the hospital as a beacon of excellence in health care. In the interview that follows, Francesco Copello, the hospital corporations Health Care Director and a former physician and Management Control Director at the hospital, explains how San Martino uses IT to control costs and ensure an even greater quality of patient care.

How does one reduce risk in an enterprise of this size? The challenges of such size are numerous. They start with the transportation of people and things: the movement/transfer of patients, biological materials, test tubes and reports, as well as all of the provisions in terms of goods and services. Its clear that a fundamental issue is to allocate resources correctly. Are you referring to management control? Exactly. The role was initiated in 2000 and entrusted to me in 2002. I still consider this extremely strategic for health care management. Previously, to organize activity and budget plans, we relied on so-called records to reassign objectives to various departments in the previous year. This proved to be unsound and frequently the cause of budget deficits. We also found management based on literature to be inadequate, because it inevitably leads to wasted resources. All this before the creation of the role what happened after? The creation of the management controller role, adequately supported by advanced IT tools, led to greater understanding and analysis of our individual cost centers and production centers. We can now assign resources during budget planning. Contrary to what occurred earlier, we can more precisely monitor expense trends by bringing together all the data that the system provides. Previously, we implemented reporting systems and adopted a balanced scorecard. This was followed by cost analysis. Initially, on the basis of the current system for the classification of admissions based on Diagnostic Related Groups (DRGs), we analyzed costs for a standard admission. But we lacked a good analysis of costs relating to individual processes, from hospitalization to drugs to diagnosis. Day admissions, outpatient care and emergency care remained uncovered and

lacked in-depth analyses. It was urgent, therefore, to get specific data on the costs of individual activities, products and drugs. In essence, if the cost of an appendectomy was evident, we wanted to break down those costs into individual processes. In which sectors do you want to improve knowledge of costs? Initially, we were particularly interested in delving into costs of outpatient services, day admissions, emergency and special departments, including the Transplant Center. With the deployment of SAS, we can now analyze production costs, cross-referenced by admissions, services virtually all activity in the organization. The result is a detailed estimate of what each single activity costs San Martino. How does activity monitoring figure into this picture? Monitoring was one of our priorities, which led to a radical cultural change from the past, helping us develop a culture of collaboration among all department managers and sharing a single perspective. In this way, each manager can assess how we consume our available resources. Currently, the information and analyses produced through SAS are published on our intranet to the executive board, department directors and directors of the operational units. We can drill down to granular detail down to individual aspirin tablets. Is there a system for classifying admissions? Certainly. We developed a method using health care diagnosis methods that has been very useful. Previously, we analyzed costs on the basis of product units that is, the DRGs. Until last year, we used DRGs to understand whether certain operational units recorded excessive expenses in certain sectors.

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we use sAs on a daily basis to carry out analyses that verify department activities and establish budgets with great results. One medical department saved 1 million in one year.
francesco Copello, Health Care Director, San Martino Regional Hospital

Since DRGs didnt perfectly respond to our needs, we were motivated to improve. We rationalized expenses and standardized behaviors in each operational unit. We also did all of this with SAS, because it perfectly supports clinical management processes. WHAT ARE THE CORNERSTONES OF THE ACTIvITy THAT SAS SUPPORTS? First, we identify approaches for measuring and standardizing patient-care activities while retaining proper flexibility and a constant willingness to change and improve. The second cornerstone is systemmonitoring metrics/indicators. Third is auditing, and fourth is risk management for patients and staff. In particular, we recognize that the most dangerous risks are inherent to routine, daily activities. We have procedures for risk assessment and incident reporting: the first assesses activities to identify possible risks. The second defines the event at

the moment it occurs and provides possible interventions. Another key point is our project to determine how much it costs per hospital bed for a single dose of a drug. Drugs are barcoded and tracked along their entire journey from the cabinet to the intelligent cart all the way to the patient. HAvE yOU QUANTIFIED THE BENEFITS? We use SAS on a daily basis to carry out analyses that verify department activities and establish budgets with great results. One medical department saved 1 million (US$1.28 million) in one year. And we have turned 54 percent of low-complexity activities into an alternative system (for example, low-impact surgeries, therapies and treatments that allow patients to return home the same day) and, as a consequence, we managed to reduce hospital beds from 1,900 to 1,600 in very little time.

In practice, we have improved occupancy rates, which today is about 85 percent, keeping the standards unaltered, and reduced the average stay from 12 days to 10.
This story was translated from the original Italian version published on ITA.SAS.COM

SAS Italy: sas.com/italy

online

Two supply chain lessons military leaders are learning from the private sector
Demand forecasting and warranty analysis offer significant savings

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Military organizations are famous for doing things their way. After all, they are different providing national security and dealing with terrorist threats are not activities commonly found in most commercial businesses. But how different are they really? True, military organizations have some of the most complex supply chains in the world but so do Walmart, FedEx and Honda. Additionally, the militarys mission dictates that they keep massive fleets of vehicles in a high state of readiness at all times. But again, so do any number of companies that run 24/7 on a global basis: oil and gas production, rail and over-the-road shipping, passenger airlines, and airfreight transportation, to name a few. Since military budgets around the world, especially in Western Europe, have

been on a downward spiral for years, many countries have been forced to take radical measures so that they can continue to carry out their missions. Logistics represents one of the largest monetary outlays for military forces that actively deploy and one of the main areas where even a small percentage in improvement can mean BIG savings. Fortunately, age-old logistics practices are beginning to change. The military is actively training up-and-coming leaders to run the military more like a business, with the term efficiency being used with increasing frequency. Instead of looking at the differences between the military and commercial industries, many military leaders are embracing the similarities and learning from the best practices of the private sector. How have private companies reacted to the

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relentless pursuit of incremental efficiency gains and the demands to wring out costs in their supply chains? They have invested in advanced analytics techniques and methodologies. Military leaders are now starting to do the same. From classroom to real-world lessons A unique program at the Institute for Defense and Business (IDB) in Chapel Hill, NC, helps military organizations embrace new methods of inventory and maintenance planning that are more like those used by the private sector. The program pairs forward-thinking military logistics leaders with business leaders to show them firsthand how commercial companies are using analytics to manage and optimize their supply chains. While profit may be the primary motivating factor for private sector companies, military and commercial organizations share other objectives. They both need to effectively move materiel through the supply chain while minimizing waste and inefficiency. Every year, select students from the IDBs Depot and Arsenal Executive Leadership Program (DAELP) are nominated to spend two weeks in a corporate residency with a participating sponsor company to learn how billion-dollar companies manage highperforming supply chains. The residency starts with one week of classroom instruction at SAS world headquarters in Cary, NC. The course covers the full range of analytics capabilities relevant to military logistics and sustainment, focusing on case-studies and best practices of organizations in the private sector. Then the residency takes learning on the road during the second week with site visits to select SAS customers to see operationalized analytics in action, bringing the classroom concepts to life. Two areas continue to be the most relevant and elicit the strongest interest from the students:

1. U  sing advanced analytics to enhance demand forecasting for supply planning. 2.  Implementing warranty analysis techniques to improve military fleet management. Demand planning and forecasting: the key to making gains In any supply chain, resource requirements are predicted through demand planning and forecasting. Most military organizations do use some level of forecasting, but continue to struggle with shortages of essential supplies and with excess inventories of unneeded materiel. In many cases, the processes and technologies they use for demand planning and forecasting are outdated. Using these outdated tools, the existing forecasting process misses the great progress made in recent years to statistical and mathematical techniques that improve forecasting. In contrast, many commercial organizations have made continuous and significant investments in technologies that embrace the latest statistical and mathematical forecasting techniques for demand planning and supply chain optimization. Both military and commercial supply chains frequently need to forecast consumption for materiel where the demand is intermittent or discontinuous in nature. Often called lumpy demand, most of the historical data show no demand for each time-period interrupted by sporadic, and often very large, spikes in demand. For example, over the course of 52 weeks, one might see just a handful of weeks with 10-20 units demanded for repair parts, but no demand for these parts for the majority of weeks. Commonly used smoothing or trending models often found in military supply chain planning tend to average this demand, so the forecasted demand ends up being pretty close to zero, meaning this stocking recommendation is inaccurate during weeks when a demand for 20 or more repair parts is received.

The potential gains are meaningful, providing greater availability for mission-critical materiel and lower inventories of unneeded supply. The results include higher supply chain efficiencies and lower costs, with an average 5-15 percent net improvement in supply chain performance.

Innovations in forecasting techniques ones that specifically address intermittent demand allow organizations, both commercial and military, to better plan for and adapt to erratic and inconsistent demand patterns. Instead of viewing average demands for each and every time period, intermittent demand forecasting techniques look at average demand in terms of units and then project specifically when those demands will occur. Its a subtle but important distinction in the way the problem is viewed. From the multitude of models that have been developed in recent years in the commercial sector, intermittent demand forecasting models are just one type of innovation in demand planning and forecasting that can be used by military logistics planners to improve the efficiency of military supply chain planning. The potential gains are meaningful, providing greater availability for mission-critical materiel and lower inventories of unneeded supply. The results include higher supply chain efficiencies and lower costs, with an average 5-15 percent net improvement in supply chain performance. In the military, food, water and fuel are always essential, but effective management of the spare parts supply chain for vehicles, aircraft and other equipment can also be a matter of mission success or failure. Given the massive military budgets for supplies and materiel, even a single percentage point improvement in supply chain performance yields substantial and meaningful savings. Managing military fleets: lessons from warranty management When it comes to maintaining fleets aircraft, ships, tanks or trucks military organizations can learn a great deal from the private sector about warranty and fleet performance management. To fully appreciate the relevance warranty management has for military

fleet managers, lets review product manufacturing and long-term warranty obligations. When a manufacturer provides warranty coverage, it is responsible for the performance, reliability and safety for a meaningful part of the life of a product. For example, an automobile manufacturer might offer a five-year/50,000 mile warranty, which means that during this period, if some component fails, the customer can bring the car back to the dealer for a free repair. But its not free for the manufacturer, who has to reimburse the dealer for that repair. This cost is felt in the manufacturers bottom line in a substantial way, affecting earnings and profits. To minimize costs and risk exposure, commercial manufacturers have spent decades refining the analytic techniques and methodologies they use to monitor, analyze and predict the performance, safety and reliability of their products. By doing so, a company can proactively identify performance or safety issues early in a products life cycle to avoid defects. Identifying a problem early helps prevent massive costs, risks and wasted production capacity. In most cases, manufacturers do not warranty military fleet equipment. Instead, the sustainment and repair cost is carried by the military maintenance organization that is responsible for the performance, reliability and safety of the equipment one might call it self-warranty coverage. Additionally, the coverage goes beyond a typical warranty period and encompasses the entire life cycle of each piece of equipment, which is often measured in decades. Considering the massive fleets military organizations manage, the same techniques used by commercial manufacturers to identify fleetwide performance and safety issues can result in significant cost savings and increased readiness. In fact, best-in-class commercial organizations can

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Nestl improves its bottom line with SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting

Nestl Direct Store Delivery (NDSD) improved forecasting accuracy by 4 percent and increased service levels with help from SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting. Despite growing revenues, the company is able to hold inventory costs flat, and its sales force can better plan profitable sales promotions. Company officials say the savings have exceeded expectations.

The heavy promotional nature of ice cream and pizza, Nestle Direct Store Deliverys primary products, causes demand to wax and wane by store or region. Before using SAS, Nestl demand planners struggled to factor in the impact of promotions. The NDSD supply chain team had to guess at how much product needed to be stocked for special promotions designed to drive volume while the sales team struggled to select the best price to maximize profit. Our existing solutions did a poor job of forecasting demand around promotions, explains Geoff Fisher, Director of Demand and Supply Planning for Nestl. With SAS, were better able to accomplish our goal of right flavor, right time, right store, Fisher says. Its hard to put a price tag on it, but it is really invaluable in terms of running the business effectively and better serving the customer.

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emerging issue detection uses innovative mathematical, statistical and data mining techniques to sense shifts in fleetwide performance when the problems are still small and emergent, affecting only a few pieces of equipment instead of an entire fleet.
detect fleetwide performance issues up to 70 percent faster than laggards and can experience 73 percent lower warranty costs to maintain and service products. These massive improvements in fleetwide performance and reliability management have been made possible by innovations in advanced emerging issue detection algorithms. In traditional fleet management, top-issue lists (in the commercial sector) and top-degrader lists (in the military sector) are used to identify and track those issues that affect the fleets performance, reliability, maintenance costs and safety. The problem with these lists is that they are lagging indicators. When something appears at the top of a list, there is a very good chance that it is already a fleetwide problem. More than likely, the military organization has already experienced reduced equipment availability for missions and excess maintenance costs to fix the issue; most troubling, operators have been exposed to risk when using equipment that may be prone to catastrophic failure. Emerging issue detection, on the other hand, uses innovative mathematical, statistical and data mining techniques to sense shifts in fleetwide performance when the problems are still small and emergent, affecting only a few pieces of equipment instead of an entire fleet. In the commercial world, an example might be the detection of a risk of brake failure that affects only a handful of automobiles in the market. The manufacturer can take action immediately, rather than waiting until several hundred thousand vehicles have been produced, sold and used by consumers possibly putting many lives at risk. The value to military organizations to likewise identify such performance, reliability and safety issues that affect mission-critical equipment from aircraft and helicopters to tanks and trucks is obvious. Recognizing the massive costs military organizations bear for fleet maintenance, in some cases up to 50 percent of a militarys total annual budget, DAELP students quickly grasp that even a modest 1 percent reduction in fleet maintenance costs by using fleet management techniques pioneered in the commercial sector could yield substantial and meaningful savings to the military. THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW Creating awareness about analytics and implementing educational programs such as DAELP for the next generation of military leaders are the first steps in achieving those potential savings. SAS opened my eyes to a world of forecasting and demand planning I had no idea previously existed, commented one student after graduating from a recent DAELP course.

online
Institute for defense and business: idb.org Predictive Asset Maintenance and Prognostics : sas.com/industry/government/defense/ asset-maintenance Demand Forecasting for Defense and Aerospace : sas.com/industry/government/defense/ demand-forecasting

Allan Manning is responsible for understanding the logistics, sustainment and supply chain challenges in the defense/aerospace sector, and aligning those requirements with SAS advanced analytic methodologies and solutions. In addition, Manning is often invited to speak at conferences and educational programs and is interviewed by various industry periodicals. He has also participated in defense sector panel discussions.

Turn big data into better policy decisions that change lives.
With high-performance analytics from SAS, state and local government agencies have transformed the way they track program performance, forecast budgets, combat fraud, safeguard pensions and predict tax returns.

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BIg AnAlytICs for InClusIvE growth blogs.sas.com/ mikaelhagstrom

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A roAD MAP to PuBlIC sECtor rEforM sas.com/iq-govanalytics

LEADING INDICATORS

UNEMPLOYMENT

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SPIKE
Analysis of social media using SAS shows increases in chatter about certain topics that are leading and lagging indicators of a spike in unemployment.

LAGGING INDICATORS

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Fore s clo

ure

Downgrading automobile

Increased foreclosures and evictions

Decreased grocery spending

Reduced health care spending

Increased use of public transportation

Increased vacation cancellations

how CAn twEEts AffECt PolICy DECIsIons? sas.com/iq-globalpulse

nAtsEM AnD sAs ContrIButE to PuBlIC PolICy sas.com/iq-prices

IMProvIng EffICIEnCIEs for CoMMunIty ProgrAMs sas.com/solutions/abm/

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AnAlytICs hElPs A nEw govErnMEnt EMErgE sas.com/iq-maint

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rECovErIng 7 BIllIon In ADDItIonAl tAx rEvEnuEs sas.com/software/ security-intelligence

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stoPPIng BAD guys wIth soCIAl DAtA sas.com/iq-sma

AnAlytICs InforMs thE DEBAtE on uK hEAlth CArE blogs.sas.com/content/hls

IMProvIng QuAlIty AnD lowErIng Costs In hEAlth CArE sas.com/sweden/

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JOURNAL OF ADvANCED ANALyTICS

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InnovAtIon AnD MAnAgEMEnt Control for hEAlthIEr hosPItAl govErnAnCE sas.com/italy two suPPly ChAIn lEssons MIlItAry lEADErs ArE lEArnIng froM thE PrIvAtE sECtor idb.org

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