Why is the IU Public Policy Institute participating in the Indiana Data Partnership?
The mission of the Indiana University Public Policy Institute (PPI) is to produce unbiased, high-quality research, analyses and policy guidance to promote positive change and improve the quality of life in communities across Indiana and the nation.
We measure success by our ability to produce and transmit knowledge needed to make informed decisions, with no agenda other than helping leaders, citizens, businesses, and organizations solve problems, seize opportunities and effect positive change.
Having served the public interest for over 26 years, PPI recognizes that relatively recent advancements in data collection and usage provide unprecedented opportunities to improve public services, particularly in addressing some of our most difficult social challenges. Advancements in data warehousing, access, visualization, security and privacy controls all contribute significantly to a modern environment in which data can be used pervasively by individuals and organizations to analyze and develop new solutions that make public programs work better. In particular, social network analysis provides a unique capability to understand how organizations, program managers and decision makers create, share and use (or not use) data. We believe that organizations can enhance the value of their data by analyzing their common interests and relationships with other organizations, such as, for example, common program attributes, funding streams, key personnel, collaborative behavior, communication and collective action.
Through direct or indirect association, most agencies and organizations serving the public are part of a network simply because very few public needs and challenges are isolated from other needs and challenges. Key questions for these organizations are, how do these networks affect the way we deliver services, and how can we better utilize our networks to serve the public more effectively?
Good policy is created from good information, and good information comes from good data. Better policy is created from better information. This is where an organization can use information about its social networks to generate better information, that is, improve the power of its data. The intersection of social network analysis and robust data gathering is the answer to why PPI is working with the State of Indiana Management Performance Hub and three other Indiana University research centers to form the Indiana Data Partnership. With the IDP, we have the opportunity to create better information from multi-organization data because it is contextualized by a more complete understanding of the program environments that created it. We want to help organizations providing public services “on the ground” get a better picture of how they exist, work and serve the public in relationship to other organizations providing similar services.
By visualizing a network of service organizations, including identifying and presenting key attributes such as clusters of organizations that work closely together, we hope to incent and inspire local organizations to collaborate more closely with the state and each other. We also aim to help those organizations that are not part of cluster or not tied closely to a network, but could benefit from closer ties, strengthen their relationships with other organizations providing similar public services. As part of this exciting new resource for public-serving organizations, IDP will create a secure data sharing platform for those organizations that want to leverage the benefit of relationship building by sharing their data with other organizations in their network, at both the state and local level. Sharing data not only will increase opportunities for better collaboration between organizations, it also will provide network members, program experts and researchers with an opportunity to use shared data to increase the value and impact of each participating organizations’ activities and services by more effectively addressing the needs of the most challenging populations they serve. We are starting this process by looking at how social network analysis of and data sharing between organizations providing opioid addiction services and workforce development services, respectively, can benefit from the IDP.
And while we are working collaboratively between the State and IU to build a platform for discovering relationships and sharing data between public serving organizations, we also will be building for the future by adding new research partners from our other outstanding universities in the state to join in this effort and contribute their expertise, knowledge of local organizations, and ideas on how to use social networks and data sharing to improve public services. We expect these additional partnerships will contribute both creative solutions to the most challenging problems faced by government at all levels, and will contribute to building our own internal capacity to engage in game-changing applied research that helps leaders make better decisions.