Gadi Ben-Yehuda This week: Nationals.

Last week, the Obama Administration released its latest set of reports on government performance toward achieving many high-priority goals, within and across agencies.  As the Center has written previously, public presentation on this topic focuses on outcomes for high-priority goals can incentivize agencies to reach results in key areas that matter for citizens, businesses, and governments.

A new report explores the topic of data visualization and its use by the federal government.  Appropriately titled “The Use of Data Visualization in Government,” the report details how agencies are turning data into infographics and how government managers can use a slew of tools to help tell their agencies’ stories in a way that is both compelling and data-focused.

The concept of visualization recalls a pivotal scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind which showed the protagonist, mathematician John Nash, looking at an expansive table of numbers. Slowly, certain numbers seemed to glow, suggesting that Nash was perceiving a pattern among them, though no other researcher had been able to draw any meaning from the table.

Dan Chenok

Predictive analytics involves extracting crucial information from multiple databases and then using it to help predict future trends, events, and behaviors.

Often, sophisticated techniques like data mining and statistical modeling are used to enhance the ability to predict outcomes and to identify risks and opportunities. In turn, real-time decision-making becomes possible. Of course, the usability of the results depends heavily on the quality of the data used and the assumptions made during the analysis. One of the most well-known applications of predictive analytics is the FICO credit score (developed by Fair, Isaac, and Company) used to determine a borrower’s creditworthiness.

Imagine a government that can respond to its citizens and its workers in entirely different ways, reducing cycle time and cost and increasing efficiency and service quality.

What if benefits came to citizens via smartphone, enabling them to find out easily which of government’s myriad benefits they might be eligible for, or to get real-time updates to claims they submitted? What if government field workers could access and input any information from citizens on a handheld device, in-person and in real time? What if an injured veteran returning from overseas could file and monitor a claim from a handheld device?

The Obama administration has challenged federal agencies to meaningfully engage the public to provide ideas, insights, and comments on new policies and existing services to make them more citizen-centric.

The administration’s Open Government Directive asserts: “Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions.”

Can government improve effectiveness and shrink costs by getting rid of paper-based approaches to serving citizens and regulating businesses?

Virtually every service provided by government depends on information that comes from someone filling out a form: who qualifies for a social service, whether a business gets a license or registration, which company’s bid is selected to build a road, etc. The vast majority of these processes now use electronic versions of government forms. But the government processes, or workflows, are almost always the same as they were when government relied on paper, leaving much room to reduce costs, errors, and the time government takes to make decisions and serve citizens.

As the pace of economic and technological change continues to accelerate, there is no question that government must transform to keep pace.

Current governmental structures, however, are still rooted in a world that existed decades ago—a world in which the Internet, mobile computing, and “big data” could not be contemplated, much less leveraged to make the public sector more efficient and effective. A review of several key elements of this infrastructure points to several actions that leaders across the branches of government can take to facilitate and leverage the benefits of smarter innovation and investment. This chapter shows how such actions would help the government move at the speed of change.