This article was written by Basil J. White and Beth A. Martin. Basil is a policy analyst for a US federal cabinet agency; Beth is an adjunct instructor and user experience (UX) practitioner.

  • The problem: Key policy decisions can often take time to evidence and develop
  • Why it matters: The effective running of government can slow to a crawl
  • The solution: Mapping out policy decisions in searchable databases helps develop plans quicker

When we discuss “business intelligence,” we envision an organisation’s inventory of knowledge and experience. How can your policies and plans and their value streams function as an intelligent network of value? In prior articles, we talked about how to represent your business as a knowledge network, how these networks help understand and communicate value, how to improve the overall value created by your current organization, and how to reorganize to create new value. In this article, we'll show you how to leverage your network as the evidentiary basis for policy and planning decisions and strategic communication, and the leadership insights you gain when you understand your organization as a network of value.

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Knowledge networks relate units of knowledge to each other without imposing a linear order. If you want to create a knowledge network for fruit, you could link apples, bananas, oranges, and lemons. Your network might then connect oranges and lemons not only to fruit but also to concepts outside the network boundary, like non-fruit items that pair well with fruit. By the time you’re done, viewing your knowledge as a whole network yields more sophisticated, nuanced insight than the sum of its parts.

fruit model Let’s build a knowledge for how your policies and plans add value to each other using our fruit model. Replace the core concept “fruit” with one of your organisation’s priorities or strategic plans. What goals might be part of that priority or plan? Nodes for your goals replace the apple and orange nodes. Might you have implemented a programme as a result of the priority? That programme would be a node connected to that priority with an arrowhead from the programme to the priority. This shows the direction of value, as the programme helps deliver on the priority.

Now that you have a network with goals and programmes, you can start assigning performance measures to them.

How Your Value Network Supports Evidence-Based Policy

To implement evidence-based policy, you need measurements connected to policy in a structure people can agree on and that makes sense: implementable, trustworthy evidence structured to identify how policies and evidence affect each other. What are some examples to draw from?

  • The Asia Foundation identified the need for governments to protect and defend the credibility of their research within their borders to enable that research to serve as an evidentiary basis for credible policy change.
  • In March 2021 the EU released a report stressing the importance of data standards essential for evidence-based institutional responses to domestic violence and violence against women.
  • Since 2019, the US government mandated implementing learning agendas and plans in response to the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, developing policy questions that are answerable by data and their current capacity to answer those questions.

Several governments require their agencies to map performance measures to strategic objectives, and in the UK, linking performance targets to resources allocated by the Treasury is widespread in the public sector. The US General Services Administration provides training to formulate actionable policy questions and to structure data for decision support.

Let’s return to our policy concept map. Plans, goals, and objectives should connect the metrics that provide evidence of progress toward them. You can help others understand and communicate how the measures directly or indirectly add value to other policies and plans. Moreover, you can trace the paths of value from performance measures to programs to goals to priorities.

policy concept map You can also determine to what extent whether the map you have is the map you want, and improve your network of your policies, plans, and metrics to increase net value.

The organization as neural network

In the US government, agencies are obligated to publish a strategic plan, match the goals to performance measures, and report progress on those measures in an annual performance report.

Because matching performance measures to strategic planning goals is already established in US law, these agencies can show how policies, plans, performance measures, priorities and programmes (P5) helps each other achieve objectives, as well as deliver on external priorities such as government-wide agendas or the priorities of an agency’s customer base.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) began developing their policy map to depict how initiatives delivered on specific priorities of the President’s Management Agenda, a document that sets policy direction for the US government’s Executive Branch. This map looks like a neural network, similar to depictions of brain neurons. VA policy map This map is derived from a relational database called the Integrated Value Model (IVM), which shows the integration of thousands of P5 as a network, like a mind map of policy. Since the IVM team used the database to store the map, they could add several other guidance document sources, including national policies, US Federal Regulations, strategic plans, performance measures, and the VA Secretary’s priorities. This holistic understanding of how policy interacts in an organisational network allows analysts and policymakers to advance from making singular policies and plans to changing ecosystems of rules and goals.

This “policy brain” has applications for evidence-based decision-making, as it shows all the P5 linkages including performance measures so that policymakers can find, assess, and develop measures and policies mindful of their environmental effect on the network.

Managing change holistically

If there's a new mandate to provide childcare at hospitals for patients during their appointments, an agency could write a policy to create such a programme at its medical centres. That policy, however, might also support an existing goal in its strategic plan to increase access to care, a priority by advocacy groups to increase family support, and a performance measure of customer satisfaction with care.

Mapping these relationships would help the agency report progress to stakeholders, and also identify what related policies, plans, and measures to amend to maximise the value they provide to the new program.

If the agency maps all of their policies and plans in this manner, the next time the agency briefs senior leadership or an advocacy group, it can report on everything in its policy and planning portfolio that delivers on each priority of that stakeholder, not only giving a holistic overview but also contributing to transparency of agency activities.

If you draw from a searchable dataset for related policies and plans, you could save your organisation much time and rework. If you have taken part in a data call where every major office must describe what they’re doing about a current issue, you will appreciate that every office must detail their P5, submit their answers, and summarise into a formal response. Unfortunately, “lighting up the building” to answer a question about an issue can represent significant salary expense and redundant effort if the research required to answer the question isn’t stored in a reusable way.

These enterprise-wide responses to questions from external stakeholders can cost days of effort to respond and synthesise. With the IVM, Basil drafted responses within 90 minutes. Further, responses based on querying the database often seem to be more holistic and complete, as the responses don't rely on the knowledge and availability of the people in the offices tasked to answer the question.

We’ve also cross-referenced policy documents from multiple agencies on a single topic, and changed the scope of some policies to include the scope of the policies from these other sources.

Analysts use the insight gained to identify the related initiatives’ policies to edit those same policies and/or initiatives so that they support each other and share a common strategic direction. These reports share a common outline:

  • Source A, Goal 1
    • Content in Source B that can help the enterprise achieve Source A, Goal 1
    • Recommendations to amend Source B to increase the value it adds to Source A, Goal 1
  • Source A, Goal 2

Those recommendations facilitate storytelling — by proposing changes to the laws that grant authority to either source, reassigning components of either source to new offices, changing the performance measures of either source to strengthen the value they add to each other, or just including a mention in Source B that adds tangible value to Source A, Goal 1 is an example of the good work delivered by the fine folks at Source B.

After building the network, you can change the policy and planning nodes and change the connections among the nodes. Enabling the ability to view nodes connected to a subnetwork of other policies and plans helps communicate why a certain policy or plan has value and where it has value. More importantly, you can manage change holistically mindful of the networking effects of that modification. — Basil J. White and Beth A. Martin

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