While the power of data to guide government management and policy is immense, that power is greatly diminished when quality issues emerge. “If the data are bad, you’re going to get bad results, whether you’re doing evaluations or whether you’re trying to do program improvement,” said Jonathan Ladinsky, an expert on performance management systems and data quality in federal, state, and local government. As Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, has said, there are “lots of consequences to dirty data.” That includes ineffective program delivery and potentially misguided decision making. “All these initiatives about evidence-based decision making are predicated on having data. But you waste taxpayer dollars and other revenue resources if your data quality is poor.”
- Publication date: April 2025
- Authors: Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene