How Governments Around The World Are Turning To Data
According to recent research by Garner, a quarter of government CIOs believe that a lack of digital skills are a barrier to achieving their goals, and chief among them is data science skills.
The survey asked 377 government CIOs from 38 countries a range of questions around technology, from how much of their budget is dedicated to IT, where they see the biggest potential for technology use in government, and what barriers stand in their way. The p that data analytics and data science skills were the most lacking within their organisation, with 30% saying they were vulnerable in that domain; security and risk were ranked second for government, with 23% of respondents indicating this was a concern.
This is a situation that is going to have to improve rapidly. The global urban population has risen to 54% of the total population and is predicted to rise to 66% by 2050. For a city to function with this level of migration, billions of data points and Internet of Things technology are going to have to be incorporated. Essentially, we are going to have to create data-driven smart cities, which use intelligent transport systems and are administered by integrated urban command centers.
Many governments around the world are already some way along the road to achieving this, with initiatives in place that seek to leverage big data to improve their infrastructure, process, or systems. We’ve looked at six governments who are currently using data to solve the everyday problems of their citizens, make their lives easier, and better their economic situation, and whether they’ve been successful.
Three and a half million people a day commute into Jakarta from the wider metropolitan area of Greater Jakarta, mainly by car. Unfortunately, while they may come for the work, they usually end up staying for the traffic, and usually not by choice. In a 2015 index of the world’s worst cities for traffic jams from motor oil company Castrol, Jakarta ranked dead last, with satellite navigation data finding the average driver starting and stopping more than 33,000 times in a year, and an estimated 70% of the city’s air pollution comes from vehicles.
There is a subsequently a tremendous knock-on effect on public transportation, which the Jakarta Government is looking to big data analytics to solve. The Jakarta Government’s Smart City team is now working alongside Pulse Lab Jakarta to leverage real-time bus location data, service demand data, and real-time traffic information. It is currently in its first phase of implementation, with the focus on two aspects: mapping locations with abnormal traffic behaviours and understanding how customer demand responds to traffic dynamics. This should allow them to appropriately schedule buses so as not to add to the congestion, and better optimize capacity. Similar projects are being seen in countries like Singapore, whose Land Transport Authority (LTA) is using real-time data from ground sensors and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) chips to improve public transport and citizen mobility. Bus arrival times are tracked using sensors installed in over 5,000 vehicles, which then transmits real-time location data of buses to a central command centre where predictive analytics is applied in order to better match supply to demand. There are also 500 signal crossings with the ‘green man plus’, 77 ERP gantries, 1,600 electronic car parking systems, 176 MRT stations and 114,000 lampposts that could potentially be equipped with sensors – all of which adds up to a significant amount of data, and the Singapore government is looking to analyze every bit.
