Open Data Institute summit 2015: Matt Hancock speech - Speeches - GOV.UK

"For if the role of data is changing so too is the nature of government. When information was low, top-down decisions were inevitable. The minister in Whitehall always had more data than anyone else, so ministerial decisions carried disproportionate weight. And with scarce real-time performance data, the easiest way to manage a service was by setting targets. Government agencies then had to periodically check in with Whitehall to show that they’d hit their targets. Yet it’s a bit like judging a worker’s productivity solely on whether they’ve punched their timecard. By contrast, in an open data world we’re no longer constrained by data scarcity or centralisation. Instead we can use data to drive continuous improvement. We now have performance metrics for all 800 transactions between citizen and government, which anyone can see on the GOV.UK performance platform. For digital services these are incredibly useful tools. We can see how long each transaction takes to complete, at what cost, and whether the user was happy with the service. This isn’t so ministers can micromanage from on high, but so the service managers, who deal directly with the users, can look for constant incremental improvements ..."