How government agencies can measure their success – and whether they are able to accurately measure it at all – remains a subject of contention in the regulatory field. Nevertheless, most agencies are beholden not only to the public but also to their administrative boards, for whom they must often produce data analytics reports in an attempt to measure and track their efficacy as regulators. This allows boards to make critical decisions regarding staffing, long-term goals, and more.
Reporting and analytics can be a daunting task for regulatory staff, as many agencies suffer from the burdens of siloed databases containing different pieces of relevant information. Worse yet, some agencies still exclusively use paper-based processes, which can make the work of data analytics nearly impossible.
In this article, we explain why regulators report their data and how a single, cloud-based software solution can facilitate this process.
What are key performance indicators?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a way for individuals and organizations to track their progress toward a particular goal. In the field of regulation, KPIs vary wildly from agency to agency. For example, in a state where license turnaround in a particular field has been too slow, contributing to a shortage of professionals in the jurisdiction, regulators for the field may look for license application turnaround time as a KPI.
Other examples of KPIs for regulators can be found in the way they handle complaints and levy disciplinary action against those accused of malpractice in their fields. The amount of time a complaint is processed, the amount of time it takes to be resolved, the status of a professional’s license following disciplinary action – all of these are data points that regulators can report to their boards to help paint a picture of their performance over time.
What challenges do regulators face when reporting performance?
Agencies in many different fields and jurisdictions often find themselves limited in their ability to provide thorough analytical reports. For example, a regulator that relies entirely on paper-based processes may be unable to generate any reports at all, since the information is not digitized or machine-ready. Agencies with discrete digital databases too face trouble generating reports, as the process of pulling and analyzing data from different datasets can be tedious and time-consuming.
Even agencies with virtualized data, whether the tech is implemented in-house or by a private company, can find themselves limited in the types of reports they can create. As times change, the types of reports demanded by an administrative board too can change, and regulators need comprehensive reporting capabilities that can be used to pull new types of queries and export the data from these queries instantaneously. This is where a software solution like Thentia Cloud comes into play.
Thentia Cloud’s reporting capabilities
Because a cloud-based solution virtualizes information from whatever siloed databases an agency may use, data analytics can now be a quick process that generates thorough reports from queries of all kinds in an instant. The software can compile information on education, disciplinary action, application processing time, and more, converting information from discrete datasets into one language and empowering agencies to present this data as they see fit.
Agencies that previously relied on paper-based processes can make a quantum leap forward by implementing Thentia Cloud in their work. All they need to do is scan and digitize their information, either in-house or with the help of a third-party text extraction service, and Thentia’s team will virtualize this data, making it instantly accessible and analyzable by any authorized user. This can take agencies from having no reporting capabilities to being able to produce thorough analytics in just a few months.
Thentia Cloud comes with 35 custom reports right out of the box, at no additional cost to agencies. Regulatory staff can make their own SQL-based queries to generate reports, or, if they lack experience with the technology, Thentia’s expert staff can make customized dashboards using any reports in the system. This allows regulators to interface with the queried information and convert it into easy-to-understand visualizations, like pie charts and line graphs.
This information can also be exported instantaneously in multiple commonly used formats, such as Excel and Google Sheets documents. Not only does this make the information more digestible for regulators and their boards – it also allows staff to make additional changes and manipulate data outside of Thentia Cloud’s system if they need to do so. Simply put, this software solution allows regulators to track and report their performance like never before.
The power of a cloud-based solution
Whether or not regulators can accurately measure their ability to protect the public interest, most agencies must make some type of effort to do so, for their own sake, for the sake of the public, and for the sake of their administrative boards. By using a simple, virtualized interface like Thentia Cloud, regulatory staff can pull information from multiple sources, process this information, and export it in a digestible, presentable format, producing comprehensive data reports in a matter of seconds.
To learn more about how data-driven technology can benefit regulators in their day-to-day work, read our recent whitepaper, The Promise of Data-Driven Regulation.
