This year’s Ihaka Lecture is about making R work in government. It was delivered by Peter Ellis, the Director of the Statistics for Development Division at the Pacific Community (SPC).

A lot of the talk is based on very direct comparisons between R and other software:

The purpose of these comparisons is often to assert that R can do many forms of government analytics better than other software such as a spreadsheet editor (typically, Microsoft Excel). In this case, R replaces the older solution.

However, the talk also provides multiple examples of situations where R will have to be articulated with other tools, such as SQL or JavaScript:

In these cases, R integrates with the solutions in place. This is a very likely scenario in most organizations, and one that should be given a lot of attention to when teaching R to anyone who is already immersed in an analytics workflow such as government analytics.