Beyond Data Monitoring - Achieving the Sustainability Development Goals Through Intelligence

As the United Nations (UN) contemplates its most important new economic and social initiative, the seventeen new Sustainability Development Goals (SDG), to be manifest in the Global Sustainable Development Report and related UN System activities, it is essential that the Secretary-General be afforded an opportunity to recognize the radical changes that are taking place in the external environment – and how the UN can capitalize on them to accelerate achievement of the SDGs.

At a time when The UN is focused on data as a statistical artifact necessary to monitoring the current state and future progress, the world is experiencing the five stages of collapse identified by Dmitry Orlov: financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural. Monitoring is necessary but insufficient if the UN is to stabilize – stop – this systemic collapse, and enable achievement of the SDGs.

Beyond data monitoring – and a reliance on modest donor promises, many of which will fail to materialize – there is a brilliant world of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. This approach – pro-active and centered on ethical evidence-based decision-support – could – if implemented within the UN with a fraction of the promised funding for the SDGs – mobilize vastly greater resources; speed implementation of the seventeen SDGs, and therefore support the mission of the UN and its Member States in a manner much more effective than now possible.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has since 2012 been seeking a solution – a tangible foundation – for moving beyond Government in harmonizing understanding, spending, and outcomes in relation to the UN Mission – particularly the SDGs. Intelligence (decision-support) is the means by which the UN can illuminate true costs, educate the public, eradicate corruption, and harmonize field effect.

The reality is that the Specialized Agencies (SA) and their information stove-pipes as well as their human networks are far removed from useful access and exploitation by the core elements of the UN responsive to the Secretary-General. Similarly, the data silos of all other organizations scattered across the eight information “tribes” that must be brought together to achieve hybrid governance (academic, civil society including labor and religion, commerce especially small business, government especially local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit) are all beyond any possible UN construct for near-real-time big data monitoring and sense-making.

A human-centric United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN) is proposed as a counterpart to the established data monitoring capability. UNODIN offers an opportunity, at very low-cost, to mobilize donations from over one hundred billionaires seeking impact investments far beyond the capabilities of the thousands of smaller lesser non-governmental organizations – while also helping tens of thousands of Chief Executive Officers (CEO) redirect their corporate spending in favor of sustainable profits that are directly tied to the seventeen SDGs.

By using intelligence (decision-support) to educate local to global publics away from unsustainable products, services, policies, and behaviors, and by promulgating open source everything solutions within each of the SDGs, the UN will accomplish its mission – its specific goals – faster, better, cheaper than anyone might have imagined. We must create an education-intelligence-research revolution.

Such a revolution would place the UN via UNODIN at the center of a global to local network of humans able to leap-frog past the obstacles inherent in data monitoring, able to achieve near-real-time understanding, self-governance, localized enforcement, and most importantly, localized self-sustainability.