A short history of data-driven government.

• Author: Edwards, Haley Sweetland

If it can be said that there is a father of data-based government, it is a famous and controversial one: Robert McNamara. As a young captain during World War II, McNamara was assigned to the Army Air Corps Office of Statistical Control, where he applied the ideas about efficiency and cost-effectiveness that he'd learned at Harvard Business School to questions of defense: What should the schedules be for the B-29 bombers? When is it most efficient for them to carry fuel and cargo?

In 1946, shortly after leaving the service, McNamara and nine of his former colleagues were hired by Henry Ford to help make the ailing Ford Motor Company profitable again, The "Whiz Kids;' as they were called, applied their relentless statistical strategies and quickly turned the company around. But, foreshadowing the problem with relying too heavily on measurements of efficiency--and not, say, waste-workers at the Ford factory began chucking their leftover parts into the river, giving rise to the joke that a man could "walk on water--atop rusted pieces of 1950 and 1951 cars," write Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Culder in their book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think.

Still, McNamara rocketed up through the ranks of Ford, and in 1960 was named president. A few weeks later, President John E Kennedy appointed him secretary of defense. It was from that perch, under Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson, that McNamara, applying those same ideas about efficiency, instituted the now-infamous "body count policy" in the quickly escalating Vietnam War. Daily newspapers published the number of enemy killed as shorthand for progress in the war effort, and soldiers were, in turn, rewarded in kind: the more people killed, the better. Years later, McNamara's policy was roundly maligned by liberals and conservatives alike, underscoring the problem of data-driven policies that, by failing to quantify holistic goals, sometimes incentivize appalling behaviors. But in the mid-1960s, it still seemed like the future. And in many ways, it was.

Embracing McNamara's vision whole hog, Johnson insisted that all of the federal agencies adopt data-driven decision-making strategies as well. His policy, the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS), required agencies to create and report multi-year plans outlining measurable results. Around this time, the trend of data-driven management also began to catch on at the local level. In New York...