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The President may be the decider but data played a significant role in making decisions during the 2012 campaign.  An effort to "measure every single thing in this campaign" led to a massive collection of information about voters.  The collection was organized in one huge system so as not to repeat the mistakes of the previous campaign.  In 2008, the data was contained in numerous databases using different data models.  This limited the inter-operation among the different data sets, preventing the campaign from fully utilizing their data and created inefficiencies.  By

Health Information Exchanges (or HIE's) have sprung up in recent years as a mechanism to facilitate the transfer of patient medical records between care providers. They are an extension of the EMR system, an area in which the Federal Government has poured millions of dollars over the past few years. Yet this brand new survey shows the problems that persist with HIE's. Customer satisfaction ratings have declined for 10 out of 11 of the major HIE vendors in the US according to the survey cited by this article.

Forecasters from services such as AccuWeather have taken issue with the National Hurricane Center's decision to not issue hurricane warnings north of North Carolina in preparation for Hurricane Sandy's arrival.  They contend that citizens and governments might have taken even greater precautions had the NHC reinforced that a serious hurricane was approaching the mid-Atlantic.  The NHC chose not to issue warnings further up the coast because Sandy technically would no longer be a hurricane once it began to mix with non-tropical air.