CUSTOMER STORY

In an effort to keep improving the quality of public services, the Hong Kong Efficiency Unit created its 1832 Call Center to hear citizen complaints. With 300,000 complaints coming in each year, the Call Center stays busy routing public feedback to the right department for follow-up action. By the time the Call Center had collected a million com-plaints, the Efficiency Unit knew it needed a more efficient way to handle big data.

So the Efficiency Unit turned to SAS® Visual Analytics for a high-performance, in-memory solution for exploring all that data quickly to spot patterns, identify opportunities for further analysis and to convey visual results via Web reports, iPad® or Android tablet.

“We aim to serve citizens more efficient-ly and timely,” says W.F. Yuk, Assistant Director at the Efficiency Unit. “The less time we spend analyzing data, the more time we can spend better understand-ing things.”

From one month to a few minutesOf the Efficiency Unit’s 100 employees, 10 analysts have been dedicated for several years to using SAS to analyze government data. The onslaught of big data meant they needed a more effective and efficient way to do their job.

“The traditional way of analyzing required a lot of preparations, such as choosing data and analyzing modules, and each execution takes a few hours, or even the whole day,” Yuk explains. “If the chosen data is not ideal, it wastes a

lot of time. A larger analyzing module can even take up to a month for the results to be delivered.

“With in-memory analytics, the Efficien-cy Unit gains faster calculations that return results in minutes – not the hours or days that it used to take. Now that we can run data with different combinations to analyze each possibility, we get more comprehensive results. Our staff no longer has to do any preparation work.”

As a result of the improved level of quality in decision support data, the Efficiency Unit created the Barrier-Free Project to improve public accessibility for the elderly, disabled and children.

Using population data and geographic information from the Census and Statistics Department, analysts can recommend the best locations to install elevators, for example.

“Our new analytic solution can simplify results and send reports via e-mail and mobile devices, which means we do not have to print and deliver hard copies to each department,” Yuk says. “This technology can help us better under-stand the needs of our citizens.”

In Hong Kong, visual analytics inspires better solutions to public complaints

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