Policy Analytics: An Agenda for Research and Practice

In recent years the field of decision analysis has been heavily influenced by the "analytics'' perspective, which integrates advanced data-mining and learning methods, often associated with increasing access to "Big-Data", with decision support systems. This rapidly growing and very successful field of Analytics has been strongly business-oriented since its origin and is typically focussed on data-driven decision processes. In public decisions, however, issues such as individual and social values, culture and public engagement play a much bigger role and, to a large extent, characterise the policy cycle of design, testing, implementation, evaluation and review. From this perspective public policy making seems to be a much more socially complex process than has hitherto been considered by most analytics methods and applications. In this paper we thus suggest a framework for the use of analytics in supporting the policy cycle - and conceptualise it as "Business Analytics".