I was reading The Economist earlier today (the October 23rd edition) and its main topic of the week, third wave economics, got me thinking how countries like Colombia should be making their decisions.

Colombia has a National Department of Statistics (DANE in spanish) that publishes data on things like surveys and unemployment every quarter or so depending on the topic. Now, The Economist states that regulators in the developing world are using al sorts of data to analyze the state of the economy while a country like Colombia is still relying on delayed data to figure out what’s going on around it. So here goes my concrete proposal for my country of origin:

The national department of statistics should be transformed into the national data & analytics agency. It should still perform essential tasks such as census but it should begin to collect all sorts of data related to the country and it should build a data-warehouse for all the government institutions, citizens and organizations to use openly.

In theory it already sort of does, but when I go to something like transportation data to see what it offers, at best there is a survey related to urban transportation. Now this is barely a way to scratch the surface of all the possible points of data that analysts could use to suggest public policy decisions when we already know that several cities like Bogota or Medellin have massive transport systems like transmilenio which gather simple bits of data like daily trips taken.

I mean, imagine that the DANE talked to every massive system operating company in the country and that it requested data on daily trips. Wouldn’t that be somehow useful for the national government?

What about airports reporting on daily arrivals and departures of airplanes and passengers arrived?

Now don’t get me wrong, I know the government does have data and that it does have those statistics, but they are usually gathered independently by specific divisions of the government and for very specific projects and purposes, however this is a classic example of data silos where public funds are supporting data gathering that is barely being used. If the DANE had and published all this data in a data-warehouse, it would be useful not just for estimating economic activity as in the topic of instant economics but it could drive research by universities, citizen initiatives and proposals, market research for companies to develop new products and so on and so forth.

Half of my daydreaming goes when I imagine what would I do if a was in charge of something big (as “the president of” or “the CEO of”). If I had a big role in a national government, I would create a law that would offer small tax breaks to companies such as banks, airlines, healthcare providers, etc, in exchange for delivering data to the Dane so that it can be made publicly available.

There will always be practical barriers to implementing such things, how to ensure that companies do not provide fake or manipulated data, how to normalize and integrate data from such varied sources, etc. For those there should be public debate and consultation with experts I believe, those questions should not be stop signs or excuses to avoid change or modernization of the government, they should be the means to shape the policy to a standard that the society deserves.

The data scientist in the government of Colombia could certainly benefit from accessing and analyzing data from multiple sources and I’m sure their recommendations would be very valuable inputs of public policy. Next year we will have congress and president election, let’s hope that at least a few candidates pick up the idea of modernizing the government, if only at least to get the discussion going.

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