Working with companies of all sizes, I often catch myself thinking about how business intelligence — dashboards, analytics, modeling, and data-driven decision-making — could change not just organisations, but governments.
Every day, we help businesses use verified data to make faster and smarter decisions. We build systems that show what’s happening now, forecast what could happen next, and help choose the best possible path. And every time I see this process in action, I can’t help wondering: what if governments worked the same way?
Not intelligence in the military or security sense, but economic and decision intelligence — a transparent, open-source platform where citizens, analysts, and policymakers could all see the same verified data. Imagine a system where you can model different policy decisions, see their potential outcomes, and understand why a government chooses one path over another.
That, to me, is what Government Intelligence could mean.
From business dashboards to national decision systems
In the corporate world, we already have what governments often lack: connected data systems, real-time reporting, and accountability through transparency.
When a company uses business intelligence, it can trace every result back to a decision, every decision back to a model, and every model back to data.
Now imagine the same approach applied to public policy. A platform where economic data, inflation, rent, healthcare, and education metrics are not scattered across dozens of agencies, but live in a shared, interactive environment. Where anyone could simulate “what happens if we raise the interest rate by 1%” or “increase public housing investment by 10%”.
Such transparency would not only build trust but also improve decision quality. Because when everyone works with the same numbers, debates become about strategy, not speculation.
Why open data matters
Today, much of government data remains either closed, outdated, or incomprehensible to ordinary citizens. Even when reports are public, they often appear in static PDFs that no one reads.
Open Government Intelligence would change that. It would allow researchers, journalists, and even citizens to contribute insights, to co-own the understanding of how their country works just as open-source communities improve software, open-data ecosystems could improve governance.
In such a system, mistakes wouldn’t disappear, but they’d be caught faster. People would make fewer wrong assumptions simply because the truth would be visible on the screen.
A small start toward a big dream
I know this idea sounds ambitious, but even small steps count.
That’s why I started by building a simple chart showing the relationship between inflation, rent, and housing prices in the UK — the kind of information every citizen should be able to access instantly. It’s not a full Government Intelligence platform yet, but it’s a glimpse of what transparency could look like.
Because when data becomes open, understanding follows. And when people understand, they make better choices.
Maybe one day, we’ll build this system together:
An open-source environment where governments, analysts, and citizens work side by side, testing ideas and visualising their outcomes before implementing them.
For now, I’m just sharing this vision and curious what others think. If you could design your own Government Intelligence dashboard, what would you want to see first: economic trends, social models, or transparency reports? Let’s start that conversation.