Smart model-based governance: Systems thinking and data analytics to the rescue of policy making!

Although Big Data initiatives are currently presenting promising results, there are still some scepticisms about their real capabilities as they are contextual dependent, and their objective and accuracy are somehow misleading. Approaches underlying the extraction of knowledge from large amount of data are surely important to understand how a system has behaved until a certain point in time. However, they unfortunately lack the capability to infer future system's behaviour and its relationship with other systems (some of which might even have counterintuitive behaviours). As a direct consequence of this, the Systems Thinking approach may help fill the gap, as it advocates the ability to see the world as a complex system where everything is connected. Joining Analytics techniques and Systems Thinking models brings us to the definition of a new governance approach, based on "smart" models.