Rajasthan, India’s Department of IT and Communication, analyzes 1.5TB in Tableau, reduces reporting time by weeks

The Department of Information Technology and Communication (DoIT&C), Government of Rajasthan, India provides technical advisory services, develops different web applications and is involved in technology evaluation, selection & implementation for the different government departments in the Rajasthan state.

DoIT&C, as per the vision of the Hon’ble Chief Minister, decided to adopt the Tableau platform to replace the traditional MIS-based systems for more effective decision making. With Tableau, the organization can analyze both structured and unstructured data from a central data lake, a central data warehouse in Rajasthan State Data Center which acts as an aggregation point for various data sources and bring it to one place and is also optimized for operational analytics. Today, DoIT&C reduced its report delivery period from weeks to hours.

Before Tableau, the organization manually aggregated vast amounts of data from critical applications consisting of over 65 million rows that translate to about 1.5 TB. Using traditional methods for various departmental web applications was very time consuming.

Also, the team was not aware of the quality & consistency of data that was stored or how the relationships between the data were established at the back-end. In some cases, it was difficult to identify and diagnose data-related issues when they arose. Additionally, adapting to the daily change requirements for reporting was also a challenge.

To overcome cited issues and challenges, the department had to request a copy of the data from the state data centre for troubleshooting since the state data center policy prevented them from having access to the production database data. After receiving the copy, the team had to load it to the local system database and find any existing issues in the process, which consumed a lot of time.

Tableau helped the department address cited issues and challenges and the team can quickly analyse the data and deliver reports to departments and tailor dashboards to individual requirements. Since reports are accurate and standardized, the team can also respond to change requests from various stakeholders within a few minutes. Overall, DoIT&C reduced its report delivery period from weeks to hours.

The department developed a Chief Minister’s dashboard application for the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Govt. of Rajasthan, providing a unified, interactive, and analytical interface that helps her and other officers monitor and analyse the progress of various key projects, schemes, and departments across the state. The dashboard also helps her accurately and quickly identify relationships between various data sources.

The Govt. of Rajasthan shared how Tableau’s flexibility increases productivity across the organization: “Being a cross-platform product, we have the flexibility to use Tableau on both Windows and Mac platforms, while other products sometimes lack this ability.”

As a result of the team’s work with Tableau, the Chief Minister’s dashboard application has recently been awarded the SKOCH Smart Governance Award 2017 in both GOLD and MERIT categories. Also, the application is recently shortlisted for the Computer Society of India (CSI) Nihilent eGovernance Awards 2017.