“Analytics is a means not an end. We need to know a team’s problem statement before we can really embark on data analytics,” said Ow Fook Chuen, the Accountant-General of the Accountant-General’s Department (AGD). AGD, the steward of Public Sector Finance transformation, had in 2015 began investing in data analytics to increase the efficiency of the country’s internal administrative functions.

Operating as a department under the Ministry of Finance (MOF), AGD held a central role in ensuring the smooth functioning of finance systems in government organisations. It administered government central financial systems and processes, and ensured accountability to the public for the use of government resources. As a core function, AGD dealt with all outgoing payments from the government to vendors, and the processing of payroll for all government officers.

As part of a strategy review, AGD sought to study new technologies that could potentially improve its processes and add value to other agencies. Ow commented, “When we surveyed the landscape, we saw more than 20-30 agencies doing some form of data analytics. We didn’t want to replicate the effort, so we went to speak to other bigger organisations to get a better understanding of how data analytics can apply in the public sector finance space. Then we spoke to the many ministries and agencies who were already doing it to understand the challenges they faced. We want to help to solve a problem, and we see ourselves as having the central role to facilitate this.”

The organisation kept in close contact with the private sector to share learning opportunities. “Data analytics is not something that only AGD does, obviously. For us, we’re focused on niche areas such as finance and payroll. The banks are ahead because they have already undergone digitalisation as they introduced financial technologies (FinTech),” said Tan Boon Siong, Group Director at AGD, commenting about the benefit of learning from the experiences of private sector companies such as DBS Bank.

To enable innovation and to facilitate more collaboration in the data analytics space, a number of measures were implemented. This included setting up a Finance Academy to upgrade the skills of the finance community and to instil a data-driven culture. To foster a conducive environment, employees would be allowed to implement new ideas and fail.

“We aim to give our staff about 10% of their time to explore and experiment with new ideas. Many ground-up initiatives have resulted and we keep costs low by using community edition or open source software that can subsequently be upgraded if necessary,” said Paul Loke, Director (Technology) and Chief Information Officer at AGD.

In 2016, the analytics platform - Fi@Gov – was successfully launched to enable better governance, decision-making and performance monitoring. A total of 25 ministries, organs of state and statutory boards participated in the launch. AGD formed a new Business Analytics directorate by redeploying staff who were passionate about data analytics and hiring external data analysts to own and maintain Fi@Gov. They conducted frequent classroom training sessions and targeted workshops to tailor analytics for agency needs, and provided dedicated support to jump-start agencies on their analytics journey.

This case is written Dr Gary Pan, Associate Professor of Accounting (Education), SMU School of Accountancy and CW Chan from The Centre for Management Practice (CMP) at SMU. The case examines how AGD reviewed new technologies, deployed best practices gleaned from the private sector and linked the many individual systems used by various ministries across the Whole-of-Government (WOG) into a central data analytics platform to enable public sector agencies to perform their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

To read the case in full, please visit the CMP website by clicking here.