Public service not irrelevant | Michael Hatfield (pay wall)

2014/06/17 Leave a comment

More on recent comments by David Emerson and Wayne Wouters (Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns), and policy advice from inside and outside government. Michael Hatfield has had experience on both sides of the policy divide and captures some of the weaknesses in Emerson and Wouter’s arguments. He neglects, however, to address adequately some of the biases in public service advice that public servants need to be more mindful of:

As Emerson suggests, it is vital for the public interest that ministers have access to the highest quality and best-informed policy advice in order to make good policy decisions. But that advice will only be forthcoming and respected under two conditions. The first is that ministers are open to hearing ideas and information that may be at variance with their own preferences. The second is that public servants focus on assuring ministers that their priority is to provide access to the best information and advice they can find which is relevant to the minister’s interests and responsibilities.

Contrary to what Wouters seems to think, simply aggregating and adapting to the Canadian context the methods and approaches of outside analysts and sources of data is neither the best nor the only realistic future role for the public service. Instead, the public service needs to return its focus to developing and maintaining high quality data sources and professional expertise and knowledge in public policy areas and identifying early on those public policy questions which are ministerial priorities. That is the way the public service can best serve the real interests of ministers and the broader public interest. The question then becomes is the Clerk prepared to make available the resources necessary to sustaining public service relevance?

Public service not irrelevant | hilltimes.com.

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Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns

2014/05/24 1 Comment

More on David Emerson’s comments on the need for a more open, responsive public service in an era of more and more data and sources of information and policy advice:

Former cabinet minister David Emerson, the outgoing chair of the prime minister’s advisory committee on the public service, said technology and big data are turning the world of policy-making on its ear.

“Government is a little information economy with lots of barriers to the free flow and use of information, so a big challenge for the public service will be how to adapt when the world is now able to access all kinds of quantitative and qualitative information is a split second on hand-held devices,” Emerson told the Citizen.

“And if they can’t do that quickly, government becomes less and less relevant because, by the time decisions are made, it will be too late.”

Emerson said the public service can no longer rely on traditional sources of “structured” and “cleansed” data produced by the likes of a downsized Statistics Canada to advise ministers in a world flooded with massive amounts of unfiltered information and less reliable data.

Emerson said his committee never took a position on the elimination of the agency’s mandatory long-form census but instead argued globalization and huge volumes of data now available have changed the “breadth and scope” of advice governments need in order to deal with complicated issues.

He said this “tectonic shift” will force public servants to change the way they work and think about their advice to cabinet, which was “traditionally seen as utterings of the priesthood.”

Public servants have to get out of the “Ottawa bubble,” re-think how to analyze and manipulate data and speed up internal approval processes to get advice to ministers faster.

“If all you are doing is relying on StatsCan and other institutional sources of data … then you are missing out on massive amounts of new data now available,” Emerson said. “The other sources of information will crowd you out and compete for the ear of politicians who are trying to anticipate what is actually happening out in the world to satisfy voters who have access to the same massive amounts of information. It is a whole new ball game.”

True enough. But the risks of “uncleansed” data became apparent with labour market information that overstated job vacancies (Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote).

The plethora of data and outside sources of information needs “curation” in order to be more useful for policy and decision makers. The public service has to be more engaged and open (and be allowed to consult and engage Canadians more widely than at present). In doing so, it also needs to guard against bias in its choice of outside evidence and advice.

Data and information without synthesis and analysis is largely noise, and not helpful to policy choices.

Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns | Ottawa Citizen.

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Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote

2014/05/06 1 Comment

A reminder that bad and incomplete data can lead to bad policy decisions and arguments, as exemplified by the over-stating of labour shortages and justification for programs like Temporary Foreign Workers.

Employment and Social Development Canada recently revised its Employment Insurance, Monitoring and Assessment report to take out weak data from on-line sites like Kijiji (see earlier post How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail):

“There’s isn’t really any good data out there. Online postings are online postings. How well can you clean those up?” he [Mostafa Askari] asked, pointing out the need to avoid double counting jobs or counting jobs that have been filled but were not taken offline. He said the solution would be to give Statistics Canada more money to improve its research on job vacancies, which are based on surveys of employers.

“I think Statscan can definitely provide better data if they have the means to,” he said. “I assume they are obviously under budget constraints as well. So they have to put that as a priority but they won’t do it unless there’s pressure on them to provide that kind of information.”

Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – The Globe and Mail.

Konrad Yakabuski’s take on the problem with big data and lack of rigour in analysis:

Yet, if Mr. Kenney and his advisers are guilty of anything, it is of falling victim to the same social media hype that has led many data enthusiasts to spurn official statistics as oh-so yesterday. Want to know if the flu is headed your way or the housing market is set to take off? Why, go to Google Trends. Forget the official unemployment rate. Just track “lost my job” on Twitter.

The idea that the trillions of bytes of data we generate on social media are equipping policy-makers with vast new predictive powers is all the rage these days. Official statistics, the kind compiled by bureaucrats through scientifically tested surveys and representative samples, seem to bore the geeks. But they get all hot and bothered at the mere mention of the word algorithm….

This is but one example of how big data can lead to misguided policy. Mr. Kenney’s Kijiji snafu is another. You’d think this would make people cautious. But in our insatiable desire to make sense out of an increasingly complex world, we are turning evermore to big data to sort it out.

The latest trend is “data journalism” with The New York Times and several upstart media outlets hiring an army of twentysomething computer geeks to massage the numbers in order to spot trends, predict elections and provide funky, counterintuitive insights in the vein of Freakonomics.

The problem is that much of what they report is probably wrong, or at least tendentious. The Upshot, The Times feature launched April 22, has come under fire for stories that either read too much into the data or leave too much out. “First-rate analysis requires more than pretty graphs based on opaque manipulations of data unsuited to address the central substantive points,” prominent U.S. political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in response to one piece on Southern politics.

The most common sin in data journalism is making spurious correlations. Just because Google searches of the term “mortgage” have closely tracked Canadian housing sales in the past two years means nothing on its own.

Big data’s noise is drowning out the signal

A final irony, the final report of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service comes out at the same time as these news reports, affirming the need for outside information and discounting the value of more objective surveys:

New sources of information and data have shaken up the process of providing advice to government, he [David Emerson] said, and the public service is adapting to accept data from outside Statistics Canada or other traditional sources.

“I think we made some real progress in helping public servants to open up and I think political staff now have access to a lot of that same information, so there are checks and balances that I think are a little sharper-edged than they were perhaps in the past,” he said.

While I don’t disagree with opening up, we also need to learn the lessons from Kijiji jobs data, ensure better quality control and analysis, and strengthen the role of official statistics and Statistics Canada.

PS thinking more about the digital revolution: Emerson

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