Stephan Wessels, SAS. All photos: Karolina Komendera

Government organisations work with highly complex outcomes and projects, and are flush with data. Logically, they can draw enormous benefits from analytics. But that reality is struggling to materialise. Globally, many public sector organisations still don’t use modern data analytics effectively, and according to McKinsey, at least half don’t use artificial intelligence or machine learning.

This situation is even more acute among South Africa’s public institutions. Why is there such a lag, and how can we establish analytics to benefit the country and its people?