Unlocking Data for Public Policy

Improved governmental data access for policy and regulation decisions.

Unlocking Data to Improve Public Policy
By Justine S. Hastings, Mark Howison, Ted Lawless, John Ucles, Preston White
Communications of the ACM, October 2019, Vol. 62 No. 10, Pages 48-53
10.1145/3335150

There is a growing consensus among policymakers that bringing high-quality evidence to bear on public policy decisions is essential to supporting the effective and efficient government their constituencies want and need. At the U.S. federal level, this view is reflected in a recent Congressional report by the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which recommends creating a data infrastructure that enables "a future in which rigorous evidence is created efficiently, as a routine part of government operations, and used to construct effective public policy."4

This article describes a new approach to data infrastructure for fact-based policy, developed through a partnership between our interdisciplinary organization Research Improving People's Lives and the State of Rhode Island.13 Together, we constructed RI 360, an anonymized database that integrates administrative records from siloed databases across nearly every Rhode Island state agency. The comprehensive scope of RI 360 has enabled new insights across a wide range of policy areas, and supports ongoing research into improving policies to alleviate poverty and increase economic opportunity for all Rhode Island residents (see the sidebar "Policy Areas in which RI 360 Has Contributed Insights"). Our approach can guide other policymakers and researchers seeking to similarly transform and integrate administrative data to guide and improve policy.

The role of administrative data in policymaking. Administrative data can be collected from the computer systems used by government agencies to run their programs. When transformed into databases that are more suitable for insights, these anonymized records provide new sources of facts for policymakers to benchmark goals and measure the successes and shortcomings of existing and future programs. Often classified as "big data"10 due to their volume, variety, and availability, administrative records are also an increasingly valuable source for empirical social science research.5 Research with administrative records can contribute new data-driven insights to inform important policy decisions (see the side-bar "Recent Data-Driven Insights from Administrative Records"), and add objectivity and scientific rigor to measuring program impact and designing effective program changes. Moreover, scientists can inform how data from administrative systems, which are primarily designed around operational needs and often not suitable for analysis, can be transformed effectively to support research and insights.

Although the idea of guiding policy with data dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, early studies only considered isolated data sources and come from a time when data was scarce. It was not until recently that advances in data collection, storage, and scale provided the opportunity to integrate data across nearly every facet of government. Early case studies and survey studies highlight how the process of data modeling can facilitate negotiation and consensus-building among policymakers,8 but also how the unmet promises of new information technologies prompted frustration among government leaders at that time.9

An important lesson is to engage policymakers and leaders to fully understand their needs, which is why we formed extensive partnerships with state government leaders while building RI 360. Integrated administrative data can support not only academic research, but also the analytics requirements of government itself. Like researchers, government analysts need access to data that has been transformed to provide insights and integrated across programs that serve what are often overlapping populations. For these reasons, RI 360 was selected as the primary data source for the Rhode Island Executive Office of Health and Human Service's Data Ecosystem project, to empower its data analysts and partners with data optimized for insights.   .... "