public sector

Big data for government good: using analytics for policymaking

Curated on July 26, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kent Smetters in The Hill: ” Big Data and analytics are driving advancements that touch nearly every part of our lives. From improving disaster relief efforts following a storm, to enhancing patient response to specific medications to criminal justice reform and real-time traffic reporting, Big Data is saving lives, reducing costs and improving productivity across the private and the public sector.Yet when our elected officials draft policy they lack access to advanced data and analytics that would help them understand the economic implications of proposed legislation. Instead of using Big Data to inform and shape vital policy questions, Members of Congress typically don’t receive a detailed analysis of a bill until after it has been written, and after they have sought support for it. That’s when a policy typically undergoes a detailed budgetary analysis. And even then, these assessments often ignore the broader impact on jobs and the economy.

Yet when our elected officials draft policy they lack access to advanced data and analytics that would help them understand the economic implications of proposed legislation. Instead of using Big Data to inform and shape vital policy questions, Members of Congress typically don’t receive a detailed analysis of a bill until after it has been written, and after they have sought support for it. That’s when a policy typically undergoes a detailed budgetary analysis. And even then, these assessments often ignore the broader impact on jobs and the economy.

We must do better. Just as modern marketing firms use deep analytical tools to make smart business decisions, policymakers in Washington should similarly have access to modern tools for analyzing important policy questions.
Will Social Security be solvent for our grandchildren? How will changes to immigration policy influence the number of jobs and the GDP? How will tax reform impact the budget, economic growth and the income distribution? What is the impact of new investments in health care, education and roads? These are big questions that must be answered with reliable data and analysis while legislation is being written, not afterwards. The absence leaves us with ideology-driven partisanship.

Simply put, Washington needs better tools to evaluate these complex factors. Imagine the productive conversations we could have if we applied the kinds of tools that are commonplace in the business world to help Washington make more informed choices.

For example, with the help of a nonpartisan budget model from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, policymakers and the public can uncover some valuable—and even surprising—information about our choices surrounding Social Security, immigration and other issues.

By analyzing more than 4,000 different Social Security policy options, for example, the model projects that the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted three years earlier than the Social Security Administration’s projections, barring any changes in current law. The tool’s projected shortfalls are larger than the SSA’s, in fact—because it takes into account how changes over time will affect the outcome. We also learn that many standard policy options fail to significantly move the Trust Fund exhaustion date, as these policies phase in too slowly or are too small. Securing Social Security, we now know, requires a range of policy combinations and potentially larger changes than we may have been considering.

Immigration policy, too, is an area where we could all benefit from greater understanding. The political left argues that legalizing undocumented workers will have a positive impact on jobs and the economy. The political right argues for just the opposite—deportation of undocumented workers—for many of the same reasons. But, it turns out, the numbers don’t offer much support to either side.

On one hand, legalization actually slightly reduces the number of jobs. The reason is simple: legal immigrants have better access to school and college, and they can spend more time looking for the best job match. However, because legal immigrants can gain more skills, the actual impact on GDP from legalization alone is basically a wash.

The other option being discussed, deportation, also reduces jobs, in this case because the number of native-born workers can’t rise enough to absorb the job losses caused by deportation. GDP also declines. Calculations based on 125 different immigration policy combinations show that increasing the total amount of legal immigrants—especially those with higher skills—is the most effective policy for increasing employment rates and GDP….(More)”

Open data and its usability: an empirical view from the Citizen’s perspective

Curated on July 26, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Weerakkody, V., Irani, Z., Kapoor, K. et al. in Information Systems Frontiers: Government legislation and calls for greater levels of oversight and transparency are leading public bodies to publish their raw datasets online. Policy makers and elected officials anticipate that the accessibility of open data through online Government portals for citizens will enable public engagement in policy making through increased levels of fact based content elicited from open data. The usability and benefits of such open data are being argued as contributing positively towards public sector reforms, which are under extreme pressures driven by extended periods of austerity. However, there is very limited scholarly studies that have attempted to empirically evaluate the performance of government open data websites and the acceptance and use of these data from a citizen perspective. Given this research void, an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DOI) is proposed and used in this paper to empirically determine the predictors influencing the use of public sector open data. A good understanding of these predictors affecting the acceptance and use of open data will likely assist policy makers and public administrations in determining the policy instruments that can increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use….(More)”

Leveraging ‘big data’ analytics in the public sector

Curated on June 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pandula Gamage in Public Money & Management: “This article examines the opportunities presented by effectively harnessing big data in the public sector context. The article is exploratory and reviews both academic- and practitioner–oriented literature related to big data developments. The findings suggest that big data will have an impact on the future role of public sector organizations in functional areas. However, the author also reveals that there are challenges to be addressed by governments in adopting big data applications. To realize the benefits of big data, policy-makers need to: invest in research; create incentives for private and public sector entities to share data; and set up programmes to develop appropriate skills….(More)”

Why Didn’t E-Gov Live Up To Its Promise?

Curated on June 8, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Excerpt from the report Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies that are Transforming Government” by William Eggers: “Digital is becoming the new normal. Digital technologies have quietly and quickly pervaded every facet of our daily lives, transforming how we eat, shop, work, play and think.

An aging population, millennials assuming managerial positions, budget shortfalls and ballooning entitlement spending all will significantly impact the way government delivers services in the coming decade, but no single factor will alter citizens’ experience of government more than the pure power of digital technologies.

Ultimately, digital transformation means reimagining virtually every facet of what government does, from headquarters to the field, from health and human services to transportation and defense.

By now, some of you readers with long memories can’t be blamed for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

After all, technology was supposed to transform government 15 years ago; an “era of electronic government” was poised to make government faster, smaller, digitized and increasingly transparent.

Many analysts (including yours truly, in a book called “Government 2.0”) predicted that by 2016, digital government would already long be a reality. In practice, the “e-gov revolution” has been an exceedingly slow-moving one. Sure, technology has improved some processes, and scores of public services have moved online, but the public sector has hardly been transformed.

What initial e-gov efforts managed was to construct pretty storefronts—in the form of websites—as the entrance to government systems stubbornly built for the industrial age. Few fundamental changes altered the structures, systems and processes of government behind those websites.

With such halfhearted implementation, the promise of cost savings from information technology failed to materialize, instead disappearing into the black hole of individual agency and division budgets. Government websites mirrored departments’ short-term orientation rather than citizens’ long-term needs. In short, government became wired—but not transformed.

So why did the reality of e-gov fail to live up to the promise?

For one thing, we weren’t yet living in a digitized economy—our homes, cars and workplaces were still mostly analog—and the technology wasn’t as far along as we thought; without the innovations of cloud computing and open-source software, for instance, the process of upgrading giant, decades-old legacy systems proved costly, time-consuming and incredibly complex.

And not surprisingly, most governments—and private firms, for that matter—lacked deep expertise in managing digital services. What we now call “agile development”—an iterative development model that allows for constant evolution through recurrent testing and evaluation—was not yet mainstreamed.

Finally, most governments explicitly decided to focus first on the Hollywood storefront and postpone the bigger and tougher issues of reengineering underlying processes and systems. When budgets nosedived—even before the recession—staying solvent and providing basic services took precedence over digital transformation.

The result: Agencies automated some processes but failed to transform them; services were put online, but rarely were they focused logically and intelligently around the citizen.

Given this history, it’s natural to be skeptical after years of hype about government’s amazing digital future. But conditions on the ground (and in the cloud) are finally in place for change, and citizens are not only ready for digital government—many are demanding it.

Digital-native millennials are now consumers of public services, and millions of them work in and around government; they won’t tolerate balky and poorly designed systems, and they’ll let the world know through social media. Gen Xers and baby boomers, too, have become far more savvy consumers of digital products and services….(More)”

Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance

Curated on June 5, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jacob Torfing and Peter Triantafillou: “Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new roles and public sector reforms, and analyzes how the gradual transition towards New Public Governance can stimulate the exploration and exploitation of new and bold ideas in the public sector. It argues that the key to public innovation lies in combining and balancing elements from Classic Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, and theorizes how it can be enhanced by multi-actor collaboration for the benefit of public officials, private stakeholders, citizens, and society at large.

Examines the relationship between different styles of public governance and public innovation
Provides case studies and evidence-based mappings of the innovation outputs of concrete public projects, initiatives and steering mechanisms
Analyses the specific role of key actor groups in and around the public sector for spurring public innovation
Explores the diversity of public innovation in different countries around the world…(More)”

While governments talk about smart cities, it’s citizens who create them

Curated on June 3, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carlo Ratti at the Conversation: “The Australian government recently released an ambitious Smart Cities Plan, which suggests that cities should be first and foremost for people:

If our cities are to continue to meet their residents’ needs, it is essential for people to engage and participate in planning and policy decisions that have an impact on their lives.

Such statements are a good starting point – and should probably become central to Australia’s implementation efforts. A lot of knowledge has been collected over the past decade from successful and failed smart cities experiments all over the world; reflecting on them could provide useful information for the Australian government as it launches its national plan.

What is a smart city?

But, before embarking on such review, it would help to start from a definition of “smart city”.

The term has been used and abused in recent years, so much so that today it has lost meaning. It is often used to encompass disparate applications: we hear people talk and write about “smart city” when they refer to anything from citizen engagement to Zipcar, from open data to Airbnb, from smart biking to broadband.

Where to start with a definition? It is a truism to say the internet has transformed our lives over the past 20 years. Everything in the way we work, meet, mate and so on is very different today than it was just a few decades ago, thanks to a network of connectivity that now encompasses most people on the planet.

In a similar way, we are today at the beginning of a new technological revolution: the internet is entering physical space – the very space of our cities – and is becoming the Internet of Things; it is opening the door to a new world of applications that, as with the first wave of the internet, can incorporate many domains….

What should governments do?

In the above technological context, what should governments do? Over the past few years, the first wave of smart city applications followed technological excitement.

For instance, some of Korea’s early experiments such as Songdo City were engineered by the likes of Cisco, with technology deployment assisted by top-down policy directives.

In a similar way, in 2010, Rio de Janeiro launched the Integrated Centre of Command and Control, engineered by IBM. It’s a large control room for the city, which collects real-time information from cameras and myriad sensors suffused in the urban fabric.

Such approaches revealed many shortcomings, most notably the lack of civic engagement. It is as if they thought of the city simply as a “computer in open air”. These approaches led to several backlashes in the research and academic community.

A more interesting lesson can come from the US, where the focus is more on developing a rich Internet of Things innovation ecosystem. There are many initiatives fostering spaces – digital and physical – for people to come together and collaborate on urban and civic innovations….

That isn’t to say that governments should take a completely hands-off approach to urban development. Governments certainly have an important role to play. This includes supporting academic research and promoting applications in fields that might be less appealing to venture capital – unglamorous but nonetheless crucial domains such as municipal waste or water services.

The public sector can also promote the use of open platforms and standards in such projects, which would speed up adoption in cities worldwide.

Still, the overarching goal should always be to focus on citizens. They are in the best position to determine how to transform their cities and to make decisions that will have – as the Australian Smart Cities Plan puts it – “an impact on their lives”….(more)”

How Open Data Is Creating New Opportunities in the Public Sector

Curated on June 2, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Yan at GovTech: Increased availability of open data in turn increases the ease with which citizens and their governments can collaborate, as well as equipping citizens to be active in identifying and addressing issues themselves. Technology developers are able to explore innovative uses of open data in combination with digital tools, new apps or other products that can tackle recognized inefficiencies. Currently, both the public and private sectors are teeming with such apps and projects….

Open data has proven to be a catalyst for the creation of new tools across industries and public-sector uses. Examples of a few successful projects include:

Citymapper — The popular real-time public transport app uses open data from Apple, Google, Cyclestreets, OpenStreetMaps and more sources to help citizens navigate cities. Features include A-to-B trip planning with ETA, real-time departures, bike routing, transit maps, public transport line status, real-time disruption alerts and integration with Uber.
Dataverse Project — This project from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science makes it easy to share, explore and analyze research data. By simplifying access to this data, the project allows researchers to replicate others’ work to the benefit of all.
Liveplasma — An interactive search engine, Liveplasma lets users listen to music and view a web-like visualization of similar songs and artists, seeing how they are related and enabling discovery. Content from YouTube is streamed into the data visualizations.
Provenance — The England-based online platform lets users trace the origin and history of a product, also providing its manufacturing information. The mission is to encourage transparency in the practices of the corporations that produce the products we all use.

These examples demonstrate open data’s reach, value and impact well beyond the public sector. As open data continues to be put to wider use, the results will not be limited to increased efficiency and reduced wasteful spending in government, but will also create economic growth and jobs due to the products and services using the information as a foundation.

However, in the end, it won’t be the data alone that solves issues. Rather, it will be dependent on individual citizens, developers and organizations to see the possibilities, take up the call to arms and use this available data to introduce changes that make our world better….(More)”

Nudge 2.0: A broader toolkit for lasting behavior change

Curated on June 1, 2016October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Cait Lamberton and Benjamin Castleman in the Huffington Post: “Nudges are all around us. Chances are that someone has nudged you today—even if you didn’t realize it. Maybe it was your doctor’s office, sending you a text message about an upcoming appointment. Or maybe it was an airline website, urging you to make a reservation because “only three tickets are left at this price.” In fact, the private sector has been nudging us in one way or another for at least 75 years, since the heyday of the Madison Avenue Ad Men.

It’s taken a few generations, but the public sector is starting to catch on. In policy domains ranging from consumer finance and public health to retirement planning and education, researchers are applying behavioral science insights to help people make more informed decisions that lead to better long-term outcomes.

Sometimes these nudges take the form of changing the rules that determine whether someone participates in a program or not (like switching the default so people are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan unless they opt out, rather than only enrolling people who actively sign up for the program). But oftentimes, nudges can be as simple as sending people simplified information about opportunities that are available to them, or reminders about important tasks they have to complete in order to participate in beneficial programs.

A growing body of research demonstrates that nudges like these, despite being low touch and costing very little, can lead to substantial improvements in educational outcomes, whether it’s parents reading more to their children, middle school students completing more class assignments, or college students successfully persisting in college….

As impressive as these results have been, many of the early nudge studies in education have focused on fairly low-hanging fruit. We’re often helping people follow through on an intention they already have, or informing them about opportunities or resources that they didn’t know or were confused about. What’s less clear, however, is how well these strategies can support sustained behavior change, like going to school every day or avoiding substance abuse….

But what if we want to change someone’s direction? In real-world terms, what if a student is struggling in school but isn’t even considering looking for help? What if their lives are too busy for them to search for or meet with a tutor on a consistent basis? What if they have a nagging feeling that they’re just not the kind of person who succeeds in school, so they don’t see the point in even trying?

For these types of behavior change, we need an expanded nudge toolkit—what we’ll call Nudge 2.0. These strategies go beyond information simplification, reminders, and professional assistance, and address the decision-making person more holistically- people’s identity, their psychology, their emotions, and the competing forces that vie for their attention….(More)”