Need for Data Warehouse for eGovernance

Information is one of the valuable assets to any Government. When used properly, it can help planners and decision makers in making informed decisions leading to positive impact on targeted group of citizens. However to use information to it's fullest potential, the planners and decision makers need instant access to relevant data in a properly summarized form. In spite of taking lots of initiative for computerization, the Government decision makers are currently having difficulty in obtaining meaningful information in a timely manner because they have to request and depend on IT staff for making special reports which often takes long time to generate. An Information Warehouse can deliver strategic intelligence to the decision makers and provide an insight into the overall situation. This greatly facilitates decision-makers in taking micro level decisions in a timely manner without the need to depend on their IT staff. By organizing person and land-related data into a meaningful Information Warehouse, the Government decision makers can be empowered with a flexible tool that enables them to make informed policy decisions for citizen facilitation and accessing their impact over the intended section of the population.

Benefits of a Data Warehouse for eGovernance

Citizen facilitation is the core objective of any Government body. For facilitating the citizens of a state or a country, it is important to have the right information about the people and the places of the concerned territory. Hence a data warehouse built for eGovernance can typically have data related to person and land. Such a data warehouse can be beneficial to both the Government decision makers and citizens as well in the following manner:

• How can decision makers benefit
  
  • They do not have to deal with the heterogeneous and sporadic information generated by various state-level computerization projects as they can access current data with a high granularity from the information warehouse.
  • They can take micro-level decisions in a timely manner without the need to depend on their IT staff.
  • They can obtain easily decipherable and comprehensive information without the need to use sophisticated tools.
  • They can perform extensive analysis of stored data to provide answers to the exhaustive queries to the administrative cadre. This helps them to formulate more effective strategies and policies for citizen facilitation
• How can citizens benefit
  • They are the ultimate beneficiaries of the new policies formulated by the decision makers and policy planner's extensive analysis on person and land-related data.
  • They can view frequently asked queries whose results will already be there in the database and will be immediately shown to the user saving the time required for processing.
  • They can have easy access to the Government policies of the state.
  • The web access to Information Warehouse enables them to access the public domain data from anywhere.

A Data Warehouse for eGovernance

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in collaboration with the Andhra Pradesh Technology Services (APTS) has developed a data warehouse for aiding the state level decision makers of Andhra Pradesh (AP) Government in their decision making process. The main objective of this effort is to organize the Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS) data and the land records data of the AP Government into a meaningful information warehouse for enabling the decision makers in making informed decisions and accessing their impact over the intended section of the population.

The system installed in Andhra Pradesh Secretariat at Hyderabad is based on an 8-node PARAM 10000 configuration of C-DAC and provides a decision support capability to the state officials using industry standard tools and allowing analyses to be made on historical data with scalability and dynamism on data from Mandal to District to State levels. It also provides web-based access besides access on LAN set up within the Secretariat, through both thick and thin clients and kiosk with bilingual information.

The data warehouse has enough potential to access the impact of various welfare schemes across the population of the state. The planners can design schemes focused on specific target groups and achieve high impact. The decision-makers can carry out analysis of population profile across the state in areas of economy, education, family units, shelter, etc. The warehouse can also be used for rural and urban development planning, agricultural yield and cropping pattern analysis and much more. These analyses will help in making decisions that are focused and the benefit of the government policies can reach the intended group.

The various types and number of queries that can be handled by the data warehouse are limited only by the intelligence of the person using the data warehouse and the data fed to it. Some of the simple queries that can be handled by the system are:

• What is the percentage of people in different occupation - qualification-wise, religion-wise, age-group-wise?
• How much is the unemployment in men or women versus age, area, and religion?
• What is the growth rate of population region-wise versus resources food, shelter and education?
• What is the percentage of land holding of people having income below certain level?
• What is the crop-wise area and cultivation trend?