Data-Driven Decisions


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CITO Research Tell Us a Question.

OCTOBER 2010

QlikView In Action:

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Sponsored by QlikView

Contents Introduction

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Becoming a Smarter City

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User-Driven Innovation

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Impact and Benefits of QlikView

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QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

Introduction Cities are the engines of our economies. Improving their efficiency and creating a better quality of life for their inhabitants are crucial to attracting the world’s best companies and most talented people. Cities are also complex, managed by municipal governments that are overstretched and in many cases facing severe financial stress. City managers and executives need data to make better sense of the challenges they’re facing, and they need help using that data to make effective decisions. In this brief paper, CITO Research identifies a transition in city management that is helping municipal service managers arrive at decisions with a superior level of knowledge at every step. Using a municipal fire department’s challenges as an example, this paper examines the transformation in how cities are using and exploring data to improve performance and do more with less.

Becoming a Smarter City When we think about city employees, we tend to see them fighting crime, putting out fires, landscaping parks, and sweeping streets. But their daily tasks are often more like those of any other business: filing incident reports, dealing with staffing issues, and managing supply chains. City agencies have budgets, and as in any business, managers are under constant pressure to come in under budget, especially at a time when municipal governments are cutting services in an attempt to balance their own budgets. Cities also generate data. Every emergency call, every traffic accident, every response time to a fire is recorded and logged. Collecting that data is easy—or at least there’s a system in place for doing so—but using it is not. Deploying that data in the service of streamlining operations is the surest way to do more with less, but that requires placing it in the hands of the men and women making decisions—like the police officers and firefighters who have been trained to trust their guts and think on their feet. Thinking on your feet is a good thing when battling a burning building, but not so much when you’re trying to decide how to allocate scarce resources.

1

QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

User-Driven Innovation While every city is different, the challenges are similar. And as managers at one city fire department discovered a few years ago, simply collecting data was not enough. “We put in data with a bulldozer but we pull it out with tweezers,” said the systems supervisor. The bulldozer in this case is the city’s ERP systems, which feed data into tradi­tional business intelligence systems, collectively referred to as Big BI1. The tweezers are the standard reports from Big BI supplemented by the occasional spreadsheet—barely enough to be useful. “A lot of our management decisions were made flying blind,” the supervisor said. Figure 1 summarizes this situation.

Figure 1: From Tweezers to a Team of Shovels 1 Big BI has come to mean the computing systems that collect data from a suite of enterprise applications, use extract, transformation, and load processes to load and normalize the data into a data warehouse, compute OLAP cubes to support predetermined forms of analysis, and then distribute the data using reporting systems or data marts.

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QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

On the lookout for better analysis tools, the systems supervisor came across QlikView in a magazine. Intrigued, she requested a demo. The demo, in turn, led to a proof-ofconcept application assembled in less than an hour. “I showed our management team just a few of these thrown-together apps, and they immediately got it—all of these totally nontechnical people—and said, “Yes, let’s do this, and let’s do it yesterday.” The fire department purchased a beginner’s package and gamely asked QlikView to spend a week whiteboarding applications. Give us your key performance indicators (KPIs) and your latest reports and we’ll whip something up, its developers said. “I just laughed and replied, ‘We don’t have any KPIs,’” the supervisor says. “How can we have any KPIs if we don’t have any way to use our data?” A week later, the developers presented the apps—a suite of analysis tools for back-office functions—only to watch the managers in charge of human resources, the department’s supply chain, and finance start ripping them to shreds. “That’s what we said we wanted,” they told the developers, “but now that we’ve seen the data for ourselves, we can tell this isn’t the right way to do this.” Taking the apps into their own hands, they tore them apart and rebuilt them to their own specifications, no training or prototyping required. “They just threw some data into QlikView and started iterating,” the supervisor says. “They could take their expertise and apply it to their data, with nobody in between.” This might explain why the city’s central IT team took some time to embrace QlikView. The city is in the midst of its own Big BI installation and the IT staff was skeptical of introducing another tool. “They think the fire department cannot possibly know anything about BI,” the supervisor says.

3

QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

Figure 2. User-Controlled Analysis

Big BI plays a valuable role in gathering information from many sources and creating a consolidated repository of clean data, free of duplication. The problem comes when you want to put that data to work. Getting the data out of a data warehouse requires specialized tools that leave users too far outside of the process and reduces productivity.

4

QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

Impact and Benefits of QlikView The breakthrough in embracing QlikView came from winning over the battalion chiefs. They were the key to moving QlikView’s analysis tools from the back-office to the front lines of “combat operations,” which is what they call firefighting. And the battalion chiefs were also critical in driving adoption because their use of QlikView forced the captains and stations under them to adopt the dashboards as well. (Figure 3 summarizes the different approaches to adoption.) Unlike the financial or human resource applications, which were developed by the managers, the battalion chiefs relied on a central team of developers to continually tweak the interface according to their suggestions. As a result of using QlikView, the number of incomplete incident reports has fallen from more than 500 annually to less than 50—an improvement with national impli­ cations, given that these reports trickle up into nationwide statistics. Response times to emergency calls reduced dramatically once they were able to see such data, and compliance with continuing education courses has dramatically risen. Last but not least, the fire department understands the total landscape of its finances. As its chief of staff said, “Finally, we can go to Budget and prove what we’re asking for.” The next steps are to continue driving adoption down through the captain and lieutenant ranks with dashboards tailored to their roles. But the larger goal is a cultural shift towards a data-driven approach to strategic decisions. Senior managers who rose through the combat operations ranks—where they were trained to think tactically when battling a four-alarm blaze—have found themselves underprepared when trying to push through incremental improvements and change. But a data-driven approach doesn’t come naturally to them, either. “The benefit of using data isn’t really validated until you use it to prove a reality or disprove conventional wisdom,” said one. “Once you ‘get it,’ you realize you can’t live without it.” QlikView has made that validation possible. “We’re learning the right questions to ask, and we’re making informed decisions now.”

5

QlikView in Action:

CITO Research

A New Approach to Putting Out Fires: Data-Driven Decisions

Tell Us a Question.

Figure 3. Different Paths to Adoption

A CITO Research Case Study This document is a CITO Research Case Study, a form of content intended to explain a topic that is of potential importance to CIO, CTOs, and business professionals. This case study was sponsored by QlikView to illustrate how QlikView brings value to users. CITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed, and communicated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems. This paper was sponsored by QlikView and created by CITO Research

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