With recent technological advancements and in the field of applied statistics, the use of structured data for decision-making has become increasingly common. The simplified goal is to support stakeholders from diverse backgrounds in their diagnoses and prescriptions, providing concrete evidence, typically based on previous experiences or comparisons with similar actors/processes. The result has been an increase in the precision of these entities’ actions, as they adopt practices that have already shown some level of success, with a lower margin for error, and are based on constant evaluation of their impacts.

This approach has also reached public administration. The idea of formulating public policies based on empirical evidence is gaining traction among managers and policy makers. It starts from the notion that the State and its agencies have limited resources to allocate in the pursuit of providing public services to the population. Therefore, it is necessary to establish objective diagnoses and criteria that optimize the choice of policies to be adopted, aiming for greater efficiency and fairness in the allocation of public resources.

Created on September 6, 2023, by UFMG Ordinance No. 7670 (August 25, 2023), the Office of Institutional Data Governance is the materialization of the proposal to equip UFMG with a specialized body in data governance, to improve the quality of informational inputs and to disseminate a culture of interoperability, which is essential for the contemporary production of public policies in higher education and research.