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Business Intelligence in Local Government in Australia and New Zealand

Published: September 2010

The requirement for open government puts additional pressure on local councils to review and improve their Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities. This benchmarking study looked into BI status and trends across local councils, as well as performance characteristics of the “top 10%” best-performing local councils who make very good (or excellent) use of their BI technologies.

For the purposes of this study, organizational BI capability is defined as the local council’s ability to utilise its corporate data for:

• internal functions – namely, business performance management, business risk management and operations management, and
• external functions – the delivery of relevant data to council’s customers (public and businesses) and external stakeholders (such as state and federal government agencies, local government policy makers and international organizations).

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BI Capabilities

Almost 70% of local councils believe that their organizational BI capabilities are unsatisfactory (poor / fair ratings).

BI Business Value

The BI Business Value Index is a composite (normalised) indicator that takes into account local councils’ satisfaction with their abilities to utilize corporate data for both external and internal business functions.

This figure shows average values of the BI Business Value Index and highlights a significant difference between the “top 10%” best-performing local councils and their peers.

Data Access (reporting capabilities)

To what degree the local councils’ abilities to make use of their corporate data are influenced by BI technologies?

The Data Access Index is a composite (normalized) indicator that takes into account local councils’ satisfaction with reports typically available through BI technologies:

• standard reports - produced regularly in a pre-defined format,
• custom reports produced upon request,
• interactive reports – IT enabled self-service reports and ad-hoc queries, and
• near real time reports – business event driven alerts and business performance/risk/operations monitoring functionality built into IT systems.

This figure shows a direct link between reporting capabilities of BI technologies used in local councils and councils’ ability to utilise their corporate data.

BI Technologies

This figure does not aim to compare BI technologies used by local councils, but rather to illustrate that the business value of specific BI tools varies quite significantly depending on a combination of organizational factors. 

Utilization of BI System Functions

This figure shows one of the factors that influence the BI business value. It highlights that local councils with a broader range of functional features available to BI users achieve higher levels of organizational satisfaction with the business value of BI.

However, there appears to be a slight decline in the satisfaction when users are offered a very wide choice of options to use their BI systems.

 SPOTLIGHT ON Shared Services

 SPOTLIGHT ON Municipal Asset Management Systems

SPOTLIGHT ON Local E-Government