This presentation was made by Rosemary HUXTABLE, Department of Finance, Australia, at the 39th Annual SBO meeting held in Jerusalem on 6-7 June 2018.

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Using Data Analytics to
Improve Public
Expenditures
Rosemary Huxtable PSM
Secretary – Australian Department of Finance

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What is Data Analytics?

3. 3
What is big data?

4. 4
What is data analytics or data science?

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Global Challenges –
Governments are not
immune

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Citizen expectations have never been greater

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Governments are being asked to do more with less

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How can data analytics help
governments achieve policy
goals?

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Data Analytics is the process of using data for
interpretation, discovery, and to provide understanding

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Why 100% samples matter

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Let’s look at a HYPOTHETICAL policy change:
Policy scenario: A benefit
is being paid to families
on a per child basis, but
the payment is going to
stop using a complex
two step withdrawal
method.

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Let’s look at a HYPOTHETICAL policy change:
Policy scenario: A benefit
is being paid to families
on a per child basis, but
the payment is going to
stop using a complex
two step withdrawal
method.
Proposed policy change:
benefit paid with a single
withdrawal rate, instead
of the complex two step.
How will this affect the
recipients of this
payment?

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Let’s look at a HYPOTHETICAL policy change:
Here are all the
recipients based on
the original policy
scenario…
RUN
SIMULATION

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Let’s look at a HYPOTHETICAL policy change:
Here are all the
recipients based on
the original policy
scenario…
And now here is the
output based on the
proposed policy
change – but how
can we tell what the
change has been?
RUN
SIMULATION

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Let’s look at a HYPOTHETICAL policy change:
Lots of low income
families would
receive less
payments
Many more high
income families
would receive more
payments
Cross-over among
middle income
families

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What are the preconditions
for effective data analytics?

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The Department has invested in five key capabilities to
build a data analytic and visualisation function
hardware
software
dataculture
people data
analytics

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Hardware and Software – our Data Analytics Platform
provides cutting edge tools and visualisation software

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People and Culture – having the right staff with the right
skills to find solutions people will listen to

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Access to Data – our key challenge – building effective
relationships and good governance works

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The benefits of sharing data
and analysis within
government

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Ensuring costings of new policies are free of errors and
incorrect assumptions
'Missing' incomes are imputed using the 'uniform_high' setting.
If the customer is not on income support, we assume they have their income
unreported because they are above the zero rate threshold of CCB. We
distribute their income uniformly across $175404 to $450404.

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Discovering new insights that provide better alternatives
Service Ratio

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Enhanced policy advice is leading to better government
decision making.

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Operational rules and ongoing dialogue between
agencies is making data sharing the new “normal”

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Where to next?

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Imagine a future where real-time data can be blended
with historical knowledge to give better insight

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Don’t miss the opportunity