LONDON—Just as companies refine what they know about their customers with every click, purchase, and failed transaction, government-provided services collect information about their clients, commission evaluations, and employ armies of analysts. Yet many governments cannot articulate what they believe about a given policy: what effect they expect it to produce, how confident they are, and which evidence would change their minds.
Four years ago, we argued that governments and firms must cooperate to leverage data for the public good. But they cannot stop there, because additional measurement in the absence of institutional memory will merely produce more inconsequential reports. Though a new public-service training program may be launched, its outcomes measured, and evaluations filed, all it takes is a new government, new personnel, or new priorities for the effort to be forgotten. The evidence may survive somewhere, but no lasting lessons will have been drawn from it.
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