The State of Indiana is breaking new
ground with a comprehensive, enterprise-wide, data-driven management system.
Earlier this year, the State of Indiana embarked on a one-of-a-kind effort to create a centralized data aggregation, transparency, and analysis environment titled the Management and Performance Hub (MPH). The vision of the MPH is to make Indiana the most effective, efficient, transparent state government in the country through data-driven decision-making. On March 17, Indiana’s Governor Mike Pence officially issued Executive Order 2014-06 creating the MPH and laying out his vision of data-driven management:
- The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will create the MPH as a tool to promote continuous process improvement for the State of Indiana.
- All state agencies will participate in the MPH by providing data, information, system access, or other resources to Indiana’s Office of Technology and the Office of Management and Budget upon request.
- The Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Technology, and state agencies will maintain data as required by law and to execute agreements as necessary to facilitate data access for the MPH.
In the past, Indiana relied on quarterly or annual, high-level, static reporting. It was difficult to share information between agencies, analyze root causes of issues, and unearth unseen correlations or trends among data in disparate data sets. An inordinate amount of time was spent gathering data and much less spent analyzing it, resulting in undiscovered insights and inefficiencies. However, since the Executive Order 14-06 and the creation of the Management Performance Hub, the state is already providing collective insight to stakeholders throughout the state.
Indianapolis-based KSM Consulting’s (KSMC) Data Analytics team worked to integrate over 5 billion rows of data from agencies across state government, federal government, and other publicly available sources—the largest quantity ever sourced in Indiana—eliminating errors, probabilistically matching data, and standardizing the data into a usable format. To facilitate data analysis on real-time data, without disruption of ongoing business, sophisticated, automatic data integration and update routines were developed. In addition to being housed in a high-security environment to protect sensitive information data, all personally identifiable information is hashed using a sophisticated algorithm that encrypts data while still allowing both direct and probabilistic matching. KSMC’s team of data scientists uses advanced machine learning and statistical techniques on joined datasets to uncover new insights—providing enhanced understanding for leadership in the state programs, agencies, and the OMB.
How did they do it?
“The State of Indiana was very clear about its goal of becoming the national leader in transparency to achieve process and policy improvement, as
well as enterprise-wide efficiency. It’s a goal that is not achieved overnight and requires not only a mindset shift, but also an organizational shift. Before
beginning any work, it was important for our team to gather business and technical requirements and use these—as well as experience and best
practices—to outline a phased approach for implementation. KSMC worked closely with the OMB teams to understand what data was available, where, and how; its current format and use; and, most important, what was needed from the data to effectively impact change in the government. While the initial process is complete, with the insights gained from analysis of the enterprise-wide data, the real work for the State of Indiana is only beginning.” – Charlie Brandt, Managing Director, KSM Consulting, LLC
From a technology perspective, Indiana is integrating data from agency data sources into SAP’s real-time information platform, HANA, and
leveraging SAP’s Lumira visualization tool for their performance dashboards. They have obtained query speeds up to 1000x faster than alternative solutions they tested and are able to store huge volumes of data via 90+% compression. KSMC processes predictive analysis with
the integration of R with SAP HANA.
What’s next?
Indiana is expanding the MPH initiative by working with agencies to gather more information and identify problems. Stakeholders will be able use the hub to improve on all their policy objectives including improving workforce quality, detecting and reducing fraud, lowering infant mortality, attracting new investment, and providing better public safety and citizen well-being. In addition, the MPH will provide transparency on progress towards policy goals for all constituents. It’s clear that going forward policy makers, analysts, and agencies will be empowered as never before to collaborate and make better decisions utilizing user interactive visualizations. In turn, the State will accelerate progress against their policy objectives.
“The State of Indiana is a leader in one of the most important technological shifts our generation will see. They are leading the data revolution not only because of their use of cutting-edge technology, but also because of the use of advanced machine learning techniques which allow them to extract the most value possible from structured data and free-form text. We are excited to be leading this charge with the Indiana.” –
John Roach, Data Analytics Practice Director, KSM Consulting, LLC.
