Experts evaluated the new model of public administration announced by Mishustin

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin change the model of state administration – move from “expert decision-making” to making them “based on reliable data” from primary sources. The head of government spoke about this when speaking to the participants of the Knowledge marathon in the Moscow Manege on April 26.

“We discussed with the president how to rebuild the management model so that it works effectively to improve the quality of life of every person in the country, and for this, among other things, we switched from expert decision-making to decision-making based on reliable data,” Mishustin said.

According to him, the point is to receive information directly from the source, bypassing any intermediaries, and taking into account feedback from citizens and businesses. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account changes in the situation, deviations from plans, from forecasts. “Don’t break what works. In fact, to create a platform model of public administration,” the head of government noted.

As an example, Mishustin cited a program to reduce road accidents, which allows you to analyze the causes of accidents and their source. Platform technologies allow you to know for sure, for example, what color cars are more likely to get into accidents. The result – blacks, according to the prime minister – is not a selective observation, but a general set of data.

“Before, every expert said that his calculations were the most correct. And now there is reliable information to use. And this is the essence of the platform model. It improves the quality of expertise at times, and hence the accuracy of the decisions made,” Mishustin is sure.

The prime minister quoted journalist Thomas Friedman: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. She must run faster than a lion, otherwise she will die. A lion wakes up every morning in Africa. He must run faster than a gazelle, otherwise he will die of hunger. It doesn’t matter who you are, gazelle or lion. When the sun rises, you need to run.” According to him, “in public administration, everything is just like that.”

The first deputy head of the State Duma Control Committee, Mikhail Romanov (United Russia), supports the proposed public administration reform. According to him, the initiative is aimed at debureaucratization and solving the problem when it is impossible either to achieve the allocation of budget funds for the desired social facility in the region, or its implementation. The government already has a coordination center that works around the clock with information on the ground and monitors the execution of the president’s instructions, the deputy told Vedomosti. Such a digital approach will speed up decision making, he added.

In the presented model of public administration, we are talking about an increase in the role of data in decision-making, believes Alexander Shirov, director of the Institute for Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “When the prime minister says that we need to remove the intermediate transmission link, then we are talking about the fact that we use primary data more than processed data,” he says.

For example, the Federal Tax Service collects tax statistics, passes it to the government, which makes a decision on its basis, and not through the mediation of Rosstat, the expert notes. It was in this way that the VAT accounting system was set up (it allows you to see all transactions that are carried out in the country on-line), when Mishustin was in charge of the Federal Tax Service, Shirov reminded Vedomosti.

Under the pressure of sanctions and the crisis, the need for operational data and rapid response will increase dramatically, he said. “We really need to make sure that we have the opportunity to see what is happening in the economy first-hand, and not in two years, as, for example, we get the GRP indicator,” says Vedomosti’s interlocutor. The complexity of the task at the same time is that the quality of data and their processing does not worsen the quality of economic policy, the expert emphasizes.

One of the risks, according to Shirov, is that based on primary information, it is not always possible to correctly interpret the processes that are taking place in the economy. The human factor plays a big role in this – people do not always understand what kind of data they receive and how to work with it, he noted.

Public administration reform is overdue, says political analyst Alexei Makarkin. According to him, the problem of experts is that it is difficult to predict the development of the situation in times of crisis. So it was last year after the start of a special military operation, when forecasts were made about the fall of the Russian economy from 7 to 18%, including by the rating agency Moody’s, but this did not happen, he recalled.

Hence the desire to move to assessments based on the totality of information, and the Mishustin government relies on artificial intelligence, computerization of forecasting, Makarkin notes. At the same time, the human factor will not go away, since the task of a person is to clearly formulate the task and interpret the data, he told Vedomosti.