Public and private sectors need to make data count more
Data is the new gold. You’ll probably within seconds or hours of reading this, receive a message from this or the other provider offering you funeral cover, loans and other products.
It is still a mystery how indifferent most of us are in responding to the question we ask in our heads – where did they get my details?
The answer may be the black-inked information given when you fill out the forms to get that store account, bank card, loyalty programme or smart ID: the data that at birth is captured by home affairs, at school placed in a file for the “department” and later captured by the tax man so you can meet your obligations to the state.
Or the South African Social Security Agency ( Sassa), for many outside the labour market. That data, alongside that we give to retailers and bankers, tells them who we are, where we live, what we consume and what we prefer. For those driven by the profit motive, it provides opportunities to not only sell that data to others, but as the Net1 and CPS “masterclass” in cross-selling showed us, the ability to bombard one with the marketing of all manner of things.
Even Facebook asks seemingly random questions of its users, to gather “data”. It’s a lucrative business with little scrutiny – until you are hauled before congressional committees to account, as Mark Zuckerberg found.
Unsurprisingly, corporations deftly deploy data to aid with decisionmaking, targeting potential customers, increasing productivity and cutting costs.
This is not lost on ICT providers in SA and Telkom’s subsidiary BCX is one of those that have made forays into this space.
CEO Jonas Bogoshi said more than a week ago some corporations have started to call on BCX to make sense of the data they have at their disposal. “We were talking to one retailer at a board level. They have a loyalty card, they asked us to look at the effectiveness of that card. We were able to tell them that the loyalty card is not working. We told them that they are likely to lose top clients.”
Bogoshi suggested that BCX was able to do this by looking at key activity trends and attributes of the client base using the loyalty card.
“We were able to analyse the basket size and the owners of that loyalty card. Over time, we realised that those guys are moving away and we were also able to tell them that the promotions they put into place had no impact on that.”
The ability to use extensive and complementary data to analyse market behaviour to inform whatever “course correction” a company may require, also has application in the public sector. Most of all in local government.
Municipalities sit on extensive data sets they collect on erf numbers, meter numbers, property value, service consumption, indigent households, inter alia. Moreover, these data sets deployed alongside the latest advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) can provide early warning systems — preempting the collapse of key service infrastructure.
However, the challenge, as Bogoshi observed, is firstly that this data is sitting in different places, being used for disparate purposes, making aggregation for decisionmaking something seldom considered. “You have very little chance of aggregating it and having a view on a citizen for instance, and providing a better service to that citizen. Or data for policymaking.”
IT IS STILL A MYSTERY HOW INDIFFERENT MOST OF US ARE IN RESPONDING TO THE QUESTION — WHERE DID THEY GET MY DETAILS?
Secondly, there is insufficient data-sharing between different organs of state within the government. There would be no need, for instance, to undertake costly indigent registration processes every few years, if there was a co-ordinated baseline of interconnected data sets, updated, processed and analysed regularly. After all, the same children queuing in school feeding schemes, come from households with their parents or grandmother; who collect monthly grants from Sassa. And those who work and fraudulently file as indigent, would be caught out with data from the tax man.
One is bound to fill out many forms in one’s life, and it would be helpful for that data (often used for profit maximisation and predatory market practices) to facilitate informed and targeted policy interventions. As the gold sector fails and leaves ghost towns in its wake, it would be good if we all recognised that the new gold can and ought to make the wheels of government turn faster.