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Creating Positive Outcomes for Citizens: Effective Information Sharing Enabling Effective Decision Making

State and federal agencies have recognized the importance of sharing information across government lines of business in order to achieve greater effectiveness and delivering improved government services to citizens. As the barriers to information sharing continue to break down, citizens experience the benefits. A government that effectively shares information presents a common unified face to the citizen.

Planning and implementing effective information sharing and cross boundary collaboration requires addressing governance issues to ensure that information sharing has the necessary oversight, organizational commitment, investment and proper participation from business and technology leaders. Governance is absolutely necessary to ensure sustained commitment. Other necessary contributing factors include an interoperability framework, data quality, security, common standards, and the necessary business process enhancements to effectively employ the information for decision making. These factors are orchestrated through effective state government enterprise architecture.

The Information Sharing Imperative

Moving into the future, more information sharing can be expected, and perhaps demanded by citizens. That means more information for decision makers. Sorting through the already growing volume of information will require the ability to quickly filter what is relevant and what is not relevant to the specific issues and decisions at hand. This is where business intelligence and business analytics become the enablers. Business intelligence is the broader universe encompassing managing information and analyzing it for insight. Business analytics is more focused and describes the process for examining, and evaluating information to uncover existing circumstances, identify patterns, and begin to predict future possibilities. Armed with this knowledge, decision makers can not only predict the future, but understand the impact of that future on the enterprise and determine an appropriate reaction to that impact. Many times decision makers can even influence future outcomes. But first they must understand the possibilities - often assigning probabilities to those outcomes.

NASCIO has been promoting information sharing for many years and continues to do so through the products and services of our committees and working groups. This year, NASCIO is presenting a series of state member Innovation and Best Practices Forums sponsored by the Enterprise Architecture & Governance Committee. These monthly forums are highlighting success stories from across the country that demonstrate tangible outcomes from effective information sharing with an emphasis on cross line business collaborative information exchanges. They describe the challenges to information sharing and how these challenges were overcome; demonstrate the need for consistent standards; and a common enterprise wide perspective supported by state government enterprise architecture. For more information about the next forum, contact Eric Sweden at esweden@amrms.com.

NASCIO on Business Analytics - Do you Think? Or Do you Know?

Business analytics provides an evidence-based approach for decision making. With the current emphasis on transparency and visibility into the operations of government, public sector leaders need to anticipate more questions and evaluation related to not only what decisions are being made, but also what rationale was applied in making those decisions. As stated in the recently released NASCIO issue brief, intuition alone is not adequate for evaluating alternatives and making decisions. Effective implementation of a business analytics capability will promote an enterprise-wide culture of fact-based decision making. State government is encouraged to seriously look at business analytics as a means for fully understanding current circumstances and make predictions about the future. The predictive nature is particularly important as we continue to face ongoing fiscal challenges and increasing demand for state government services. Visit www.nascio.org/publications to download this publication from the Enterprise Architecture & Governance Committee.

This project was supported by Grant No. 2009-D2-BX-K013 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Leading the Way to New OpportunITies at the 2010 Midyear Conference

Registration for the conference is NOW OPEN. Early Bird rates will be in effect through Wednesday, March 17. The conference will be held April 28-30 at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore, Maryland. Visit the conference website for more details.

Be sure to secure your sponsorship for the 2010 Midyear Conference. Click here to learn more about sponsoring the conference.

A new sponsor benefit for 2010! Sponsors not only get a chance to submit educational items to the Virtual Resource Center, but those materials will also be added to a thumb drive that will be handed out to each state CIO at the conference. This addition to the conference contributed to our members' green efforts and the state members will appreciate the quick access to the thought-leadership pieces. The Midyear Conference Virtual Resource Center will open on Monday, March 1.

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