A Forbes Insights case study titled “Analytics Paves the Way for Better Government” details some of the ways that national and regional governments around the world are implementing data analytics solutions to improve economic results and modernize their own processes. According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, public institutions have the potential to generate or save up to $3 trillion through the use of analytics, by digitizing information and using data to improve decision-making.

One of the key elements to successful data usage is sharing among agencies, something that, as the report notes, is not nearly as common as it should be. One U.S. state that has implemented a data sharing program is Indiana, which is using analytics to achieve a number of public policy goals in education, employment and health care.

At the local level, the city of Austin, Texas, is developing a solution to track everything from finances and permits to crime statistics. A recent InformationWeek article also points out that several government agencies are already using analytics to fight fraud in Social Security and other benefits programs.

The main obstacle that governments will face as they adopt data analytics plans, as Forbes points out, is extracting valuable insights from the vast quantities of data they manage. Public agencies can benefit from the use of data management services to achieve that end. While governments have access to more information than ever before, it comes from a variety of different sources and, taken separately, provides little in the form of useful insights. Extract, transform, load (ETL) tools gather that data and convert it to a unified format that is easy to analyze and draw conclusions from.