The ministry moved this model to Microsoft Azure and can now run its calculations in just 47 minutes at a cost of just over $200 (CAD). The saved time and money means that forest officials can update their model more frequently, factoring changing circumstances into their equations. By incorporating up-to-date information into their planning efforts, the ministry is now better positioned to create effective forest policies.

In the same way, today’s advanced technology can help governments at all levels dramatically improve their effectiveness. With the insights that big data analytics provides, governments can improve their collaborative decision-making, thereby increasing productivity, reducing costs, and better serving their constituents.

More effective legislation

Officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government can combine improved insights with collaboration to better understand trends, which, in turn, can lead to improved rules and regulations. For example, governments can use collaborative tools to encourage citizens to provide feedback. They can then apply advanced analytics to quickly evaluate these comments and introduce new rules that respond to constituents’ concerns.

Likewise, governments can monitor the reports required of permit holders to identify patterns that inform their decision-making. By analyzing the reports of oil drillers and trucks carrying toxic materials, for example, officials can better understand the conditions that lead to spills and then update their rules to lower the risks.

More productive workers

At the local level, governments can use advanced analytics and collaboration to improve the productivity of workers in the field. Using tools such as Microsoft Office 365 to communicate and work with other teams in the community, for example, field workers can stay up-to-date on developments and more easily prioritize their workloads. And by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data from computerized sensors installed in equipment, workers can combine this information with machine learning to perform predictive maintenance on their vital assets. As a result, they will have the ability to fix infrastructure such as a bridges and water mains after they break—in some cases, even keeping infrastructure in operation longer before it needs to be replaced.

It’s been said, “Alone we are smart; together we are brilliant.” By adding advanced analytics into the equation, governments can improve their collaborative decision-making even further and ultimately accomplish much more. Interested in learning more? Request one of our available trials: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial. Have a specific question regarding Azure for Government? Ask it here.

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Cities, hospitals, and educational institutions have many different assets that are maintained by fieldworkers. These assets are core to the running of their business and include things such as heaters, buildings, roads, lighting and water systems.

Wasted Energy and Lowered Productivity
By not giving its blue collar workers technology tools, cities are actually contributing to wasted energy resources and a lack of productivity. Let’s look at those two areas in a little more detail:

•  Energy Consumption. In terms of energy consumption, facilities could be wasting large amount of         energy to heat or chill buildings, and this discovery happens after the fact – resulting in long periods of wasted expense on energy. An example is a broken thermostat, or a dampener stuck open.

In fact, studies show that up to 30% of an energy bill is wasted energy. In a city like Vancouver, which spends $28 million on electricity alone, this could account for up to $8.4 million wasted annually.

• Workforce Productivity. Without technology proactively reporting problems, the workforce is spending large amounts of time trying to find what is causing problems, or they are engaged in fixing unforeseen events.

By addressing problems in a proactive and timely manner, institutions could tackle problems before they become severe or have a spillover effect. Examples of this are replacing a pump before it breaks, or fixing a key escalator in a transit system before rush hour. If the escalator fails during rush hour, this causes large disruptions in the movement of people, resulting is numerous spillover effects, such as missed appointments or traffic slowdowns.

Using Technology to Address the Issues
Technology is currently being used to address the issues of energy and time wasting.
The Microsoft 88 Acres story , for instance, talks about how we at Microsoft built a facilities management solution to manage our building assets across our Redmond, WA campus. This solution:

• Tracks over 2 million endpoints today
• Cut our power consumption by 30%
• Started paying for itself on day one
• Paid itself off completely within 18 months
• Allows us to manage our workforce to proactively support our business

The Power of the Internet of Things
So what exactly do we mean by the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things (IoT) allows one to collect information from sensors, which can now be placed on almost any asset. These could be sensors for motor controls, heating units, and even sensors that will alert when roadways are wearing out. In essence, the sensors generate large amounts of data, indicating the state that an asset is in.
This data can be collected in order to ascertain basic information, such as a light being on or off. But the real power comes when one has powerful computing that can cross reference multiple sensors and come to conclusions.

An example is a window being open while a heater is on and the outside temperature is freezing. Each of these component information pieces on their own give the user value. Knowing that it is freezing outside and that the heater is on, the person can see that the heater is operating due to weather conditions. However, when the third piece of information – the open window – is added to the equation, the real power starts to come into play. If a window is open, thus allowing the heat to escape, the question now becomes: should the heater be on? Or should the window be closed and the heater off, thus saving money? It is the ability to combine these different pieces of information that demonstrates the power of the IoT.

There are also benefits around workforce management.
If we follow along the same example, after several month or weeks, the operations arm of an organization might notice that they are spending higher amounts on energy. This would lead to an investigation of the problem, taking people hours to perform and possibly requiring movement of these people over large geographical distances. (Such as a maintenance worker at a school district who may need to travel hundreds of kilometers). With the IoT, the problem can be analyzed and shown in real time, and labor can instead be deployed on more critical tasks.

The Impact on Blue Collar Workers
The IoT offers cities the ability to prioritize their workforces more effectively. This would allow them to focus on trouble areas before they become disasters and prioritize their work based upon needs. An example is how ThyssenKrupp is using IoT to monitor its elevator and escalator assets worldwide. Based upon the reporting by sensors and the use of machine learning, ThyssenKrupp is able to identify faults that will occur in their products before they actually occur. This in turn allows for them to deploy their workers to attend to issues before they become real problems.

Aligning the IoT with workers can be a massive productivity output to organizations. Through the use of better information, workers are proactively fixing issues and/or are prioritizing work in a manner that deals with the severity/cost of the issue to the organization.

Conclusion
The Microsoft Internet of Things platform is built on a scalable, secure enterprise system that leverages an ecosystem of more than 650,000 worldwide partners.
The platform helps Cities, Health Institutions, and Education facilities to take advantage of their existing infrastructures, yet optimize their performance. This optimization will lead to cost savings around energy usage and workforce management and will benefit all parties that use the institutions’ infrastructures on a collective basis.

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Although there are supposedly some tangible benefits to this concept, I have honestly not seen them. I am not saying being more transparent and sharing data is a bad thing. But can governments justify to their taxpayers that they are getting value for the money being spent to post this information online?

As we consider this issue, I would like to propose some alternative discussions we might want to have. These conversations should be about data collection, updating legacy operational systems, removing paper forms, and organizational collaboration strategy.

The Fundamentals of the Open Data Movement
All these conversations should start with the fundamentals. Governments collect a lot of data, as they are in the business of regulation creation and enforcement as well as income redistribution. From this, they must create and enforce these regulations, as well as document their implementation. Governments also run on tax payer money, so at the end of the day, they are accountable for how they execute these regulations and how they have redistributed the monies they have collected.

If I was to break down the open data movement, I would classify it in to two camps:

• Those that want accountability and transparency
• Those that want to leverage the data for a value-added benefit

In this blog, we’ll focus on the first camp. We’ll delve into the second camp in our next blog.

Accounting and Transparency
Many times there are directives of more accountability and transparency on what government is doing. Where things get interesting is the ability for governments to share their information in a format that is consumable.

Let’s take a simple budget analysis. Over the last 4 years, I have had the luxury of reading and analyzing the provincial budgets, strategic plans, and annual reports for all the Canadian provinces and many of the larger cities. My observational summaries:

• There is no consistent method on how these reports are presented.
• There is no common set of metrics that they follow.
• There is no real ability to get at any of the information unless one does forensic accounting.
• All the information is essentially in large PDF documents

In essence, there is no common method of accounting, so there is also no common method of doing the reporting and data presentation.

The Need for Better Tools
Most of our government customers have an ERP system in place, but they do not have a method of effectively tracking the movement of money from the treasury (or equivalent department or ministry) to their respective recipients (other ministries, agencies, third party organizations). Taking this back to open data, what occurs then is the ability for only basic information to be presented back to the public in a limited format – often buried in an annual report or budget documents.

When I look at this problem, the open data discussion quickly morphs into the need for a better set of ERP and CRM tools for the management of the money, as well as analytics tools. Once these systems are in place, a more meaningful discussion around open data can take place.

Performance Metrics
Another area that seems to have no consistency in government is performance metrics. One of the reason governments are unable to be more transparent is that they have no ability to collect good information and analyze it to generate performance metrics that are meaningful. In the vast majority of cases, information by governments is still collected on forms that are paper-based. This has led to governments spending vast amounts on document management systems.

Permits and Licenses
Focusing on online permits and licenses, online services, and the use of a common platform for these systems (CRM in most cases) would offer a solid step in finding ways to alleviate the data collection problem.

In helping Cities leverage technology, I’ve observed we look at open data as an Azure-hosted play of the data, and often view enhancing the document management experience as a separate discussion. What we should be doing, though, is connecting the two together to focus the discussion around transforming legacy paper-based systems. This will make the document management system redundant and provide a richer data set to make available through open data – as well as make data more usable for performance management and data analytics. By taking a holistic approach we can help Cities gain scaled benefit from their investments … a 1 + 1 = 3.

I would love to get your insights or feedback about this conversation. In the meantime, I hope you join me for the next blog, where I will look at open data for value-added benefit.

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