AI is breathing new life into data-driven government. Here’s how

Data analytics programmes in Southeast Asia are helping agencies personalise relief aid in Singapore and transform smart city operations in Jakarta, helping civil servants sift through the noise and support citizens more quickly.

And AI is set to accelerate the work of data-driven government. AI-powered services will not only accelerate decision-making but also drive predictive analytics and transform customer service through the adoption of generative AI tools like chatbots.

GovInsider speaks to D Manoranjan, CTO Oak Consulting (A Beyond Limits Company), & VP Engineering Beyond Limits APAC, who will have a booth at the upcoming Public Sector Day, to learn more.

As governments in Southeast Asia increasingly embrace digitalisation, how can they tap on data management, analytics, and AI to drive citizen centricity?

By leveraging data management, analytics, and AI, governments in Southeast Asia can transform their approach to governance, placing citizens at the centre of decision-making and service provision. This will improve efficiency, enhance public satisfaction, improve resource allocation, and ultimately, lead to more citizen-centric government.

With data management, governments can analyse large volumes of data to identify preferences, trends, and challenges faced by citizens to guide policy decisions. When policies are aligned with citizen needs and preferences, they will lead to improved public satisfaction and better outcomes. The data can also optimise service delivery to citizens to meet their needs effectively.

Agencies can also leverage AI to improve and optimize service delivery, including providing advanced next-generation cybersecurity to protect citizens’ data and national security assets as well as support real time decision-making. A good example would be in AI-powered traffic and urban planning that can optimise city planning and infrastructure development.

What are some of the challenges that agencies face when tapping on data analytics, and how can these be overcome?

Addressing these challenges requires strategic planning, investment in training and talent, robust data governance frameworks, and a commitment to privacy and security. Some ways these challenges can be overcome are:
 

1. Availability of data and its quality: Establish data quality standards and implement automated data pipelines to clean and validate data. In addition, implement a regime of periodic audits to ensure data quality and completeness.
    
2. Scale: Leverage on proven big data platforms and technologies including AWS services and develop and deploy data analytics using industry best practices.
    
3. Shortage of Skills and Talent: Invest in training programs and partner with industry and institutes of higher learning to ensure a sufficient pool of talent through upskilling as well as tapping on fresh graduates.
    
4. Change Management and Adoption: Implement robust change management strategies which involve key stakeholders, including communication plans and training programs, to facilitate smooth transitions and acceptance of new processes and technologies.
    

How is enterprise artificial intelligence changing the game for data-driven decision making in agencies?

Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing data-driven decision-making in government by providing advanced analytical capabilities, automating processes, and optimizing resource allocation and service delivery.

The ongoing advancements in these technologies suggest a promising future where data-driven decision-making in government will undergo even more significant and transformative enhancements.

They provide enhanced insights and predictive analytics, streamline government services, enable fraud detection and prevention, risk management, automation of routine and mundane tasks, and more.

What are some of the tools on the market that can help agencies better embrace data analytics to drive decision making?

There are many tools and platforms available in the market that can help government agencies better embrace data analytics and AI to drive decision-making. These include data analytics tools such as QlikView/Qlik Sense, Tableau, Power BI and so on.

For AI, the tools include Amazon SageMaker, Dataiku and a number of powerful open-source tools like TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. The advent of Generative AI has seen an explosion of GPT tools including ChatGPT and Amazon Bedrock, which allows organisations to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.

Oak Consulting has a full suite of tools for MLOps, AIOps and KBOps. Oak Consulting’s AI is built on top of a hybrid AI engine which includes human-like reasoning, with explainability, confidence measures and audit trails built in. KBOps stands for knowledge base operations and combines numerical AI, cognitive AI, human-like reasoning, predictive recommendation engine and an industrial ChatGPT to codify human knowledge and combine with machine learning to provide actionable recommendations in real time.

How is Oak Consulting supporting organisations, both public and private, in meeting their data management, data analytics, and artificial intelligence goals?

Oak Consulting brings a wealth of real-world experience in data management, data visualization, data analytics and artificial intelligence with more than 10 years of designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining large enterprise scale data centric projects in both the public and private sectors.

Through our parent company, Beyond Limits, we bring a heritage of cognitive and symbolic industrial AI which provides explainability, cognitive tracing, and audit trails to ensure the AI recommendations can be trusted and are reliable.

Oak Consulting has large enterprise level case studies in both public and private sectors which include data ingestion, data management, data modelling, data warehousing, data visualization through to ML and AI applications. Our solutions are deployed in both government commercial and private cloud environments.

To learn more about Oak Consulting’s cutting-edge AI and data analytics, tools, platforms, and use cases for government, come chat with Oak Consulting’s subject matter experts at their Public Sector Day booth on 5 October by registering here.