29 As township departments increasingly coordinate their problem-solving efforts, township officials will need to use data to clearly understand their community’s needs. While individual departments have their routine responsibilities, there are complex or “wicked” problems—problems with hard-to-understand causes—that require a coordinated response across the whole township administration. When combined with problem-solving approaches such as SARA (see box F), and digital data collection and storage, data shared across departments will paint a richer portrait of local issues and foster a shared understanding of the root causes of problems (see box K). The existing system of township committees provides an established forum for convening departments to discuss collaborative policymaking using shared data. As data quality improves, and the body of data on local problems grows, township administrations must be prepared to receive “bad news.” As data collection focuses on what local communities really care about, and data-collection methods become more rigorous, collected data may give the impression that things are getting worse. This is a common side-effect of datareform efforts everywhere. It can provoke pushback from leaders, who don’t want to be embarrassed by bad news. It can create a powerful incentive to dissemble in situations where data is used for performance management. But leaders must appreciate that understanding the true extent of a problem is essential to solving it, despite the superficial impression of failure. For example, improved data collection and interdepartmental sharing on the subject of road crashes might plausibly generate a spike in the number of reported crashes. But there haven’t been more crashes; authorities are just reporting more accurate numbers, which should allow them to develop more effective roadsafety policies. Senior leaders should support township administrations that are trying to understand the extent and root causes of problems. Township-level analysis of digital data should have a clear purpose and a clear audience, and it should use readily available and easily understood tools. Data analysis by township officials should support local decision-makers by focusing on local priorities or critical aspects of township administration. More efficient data collection carries the risk that “too much” data will overwhelm local analysts and decision-makers or generate more work for township departments. Additional skills and resources may be needed. While modern data-analysis tools have exciting capabilities, it’s unrealistic to expect township officials to instantly use complex statistical analysis tools. In the short term, local officials need to develop competence and confidence with tools like Excel, and to a body of routine skills and procedures for managing data so that it can be used for analysis and visualizations. Data visualizations are a powerful tool to communicate data analysis. Complex and technical data analysis may be incomprehensible to policymakers with basic dataliteracy skills. Data visualizations, like simple graphs of trends and outliers or the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to present geographic or spatial data, are readily available tools that can build on the existing use of tabular data at the township level (see figure 3.3). Data dashboards can apprise decision-makers of the indicators most important to their work, without their needing to understand statistics to interpret the data. In Taunggyi, for example, municipal authorities revised the tax collection system after using a data dashboard to discover that the majority of households were paying less than 1,000 kyat biannually. Data communication and visualization tools should be tested and evaluated iteratively among township officials to be sure they are easy to use and understand.