Unlocking Decision-Making with Revenue & Transaction Data

Today’s government policies can profoundly affect residents’ lives – impacting health care, education, job opportunities, community trust, and more. More and more, today’s forward-thinking organizations are leveraging data and technology as it relates to payment transactions to transform decision-making and shape meaningful policy.

In a recent International City/County Management Association (ICMA) webinar, Morgan Jines, Tyler’s vice president of payments, discussed the intersection between transaction data and decision-making and how it can be used to effectively empower government leaders and better serve communities.

Unlocking Informed Decision-Making With Data and Technology

Improved access to data and technology allows government leaders to make decisions using factual and holistic information. This is critically important because government decisions can directly impact the lives of the residents they service, particularly in areas such as health care, pensions, job opportunities, education, and homelessness.

“One bad decision can have long term effects,” Jines said. “If you get it right the first time, it can also have immediate positive results.”

Additionally, with the right access to data, governments can not only make better, data-driven decisions, they can often make them more quickly. This allows for a better utilization of resources and improved outcomes across the government enterprise.

Building a Foundation of Data Governance

Effectively leveraging data for informed decision-making starts with building a foundation for data governance. This can be done by ensuring the data being collected is diverse, timely, accurate, discoverable, and consumable.

• Diverse: Ensure the data being captured provides a holistic view across all areas of government.
• Timely: Verify the data is collected in real time. Real-time data is crucial for rapid decisions.
• Accurate: Maintain data integrity to ensure rest of pillars are valid.
• Discoverable: Guarantee the accessibility of data through tooling, such as advanced search capabilities and metadata.
• Consumable: Assure the data collected uses standardized formats, analytics, and models that are applicable to all government types.

“Each of these five factors play a critical role in building a foundation for data governance,” Jines said. “Keeping each of these factors in mind will ensure you get it right the first time.”

Utilizing Revenue & Transaction Data for Strategic Decisions

Discover how governments can leverage data and technology as it related to payment transactions.

Three Pillars of Data-Driven Decision-Making

When it comes to strong decision-making, three areas should be examined: technology metrics, mission performance metrics, and culture audit results. Technology metrics account for system uptime, vulnerability risks, cyber incidents, and data quality vs. data quantity. Mission performance metrics include items such as capital budgeting projects, payer adoption, service level agreements, and community involvement. Finally, culture audit results incorporate qualitative items like employee engagement and morale, trust in tools and leadership, and behavior patterns.

All these metrics overlap and are important in achieving data-driven decision-making. Leveraging these three pillars allows governments to harness the power of data to better protect forecasting and revenue.

Key Questions Government Tech Leaders Should Be Asking

All agencies are at different points at the start of their data journey, the questions below are all good to consider no matter what phase of this journey you’re on.

• People
  • How well-equipped is our staff to deliver on their mission of better-quality governmental services?
  • Which resources could be better utilized or focused on other priorities?
  • Which key stakeholders will be responsible for data analysis and reporting across the enterprise?
• Process
  • Have we ensured the integrity of all data available across departments?
  • Have we defined which processes could be improved or automated leveraging data?
  • Which departmental priorities should be considered when looking at data?
  • What operational or administrative processes could be modified with real-time access to data?
  • What new processes should be created to ensure data integrity, data quality, and timely decision-making?
• Tools
  • Have we determined the appropriate and necessary tooling to analyze, investigate, and evaluate our data?
  • Have we identified the cadence? Which analytics will be leveraged?
  • Have we created a phased approach by department to accessing real-time data and prioritizing critical use cases?