Analysts are an integral part of public safety agencies, but their effectiveness hinges on access to reliable, comprehensive data. For years, analysts have pieced together data from multiple sources through SQL queries, spreadsheets, and custom development, but this process is meticulous and often too narrow in scope.
Agencies and analysts need more.
What the right data can do for analysts
By viewing data holistically, analysts can not only uncover agency insights, but strengthen their understanding and reporting on current realities. Those positive outcomes can have the following agency wide effects:
- Accurate and reliable data enhances trend identification (e.g., similarities between the location of incidents, frequency, time of day, etc.).
- Comprehensive data eliminates the need to make decisions based on hunches or assumptions without evidence-based support.
- With a properly logged event history, analysts can review patterns and make historical determinations. It’s crucial for an agency’s analytics system to maintain a history of captured data, even if the source systems don’t.
- Analytical reporting supports agency accountability and transparency with the public. For example, agencies can create and present public-facing reports and dashboards that can counter challenges and dispel misconceptions.
But understanding the need for complete, trustworthy data is easier than achieving it. What do agencies need to do to give their analysts the information they require?
Tools your analysts need & how they help
The right analytics and records management systems can help analysts develop new and insightful ways to assess incident specifics, draw conclusions, optimize inefficiencies, and ensure regulatory compliance. Together, the systems complete your data picture, along with other key advantages:
- One location for data: A modern data warehouse is a single source of organizational truth for users to explore, analyze, and share. It combines disparate sources of information, including ETL scripts, databases, and semantic models to integrate data. Analysts then receive the data in an easy-to-understand format.
- Custom reporting for your needs: Custom ad-hoc reporting empowers analysts to tailor results to their needs and add new data sources. Better-organized data results in faster searches and more complete real-time results. Analysts can also view data over time and geographic areas to better understand incidents.
- Consistent, quality records: Powerful capture tools allow users to manage records and the context in which they are created, accessed, and modified. By combining unified data access and self-serve analytics, analysts can easily discover trends in crime data, deliver efficient and effective services, and communicate with key stakeholders.
With the right data and tools, your agency analysts can finally perform a truly comprehensive data analysis from one source, every time.
To explore analytics and records management systems that integrate for a holistic view, check out the HxGN OnCall portfolio of public safety solutions.
