How many politicians base their decisions on data? Not many, as far as I can tell. Politicians tend to prefer spouting soundbites to crunching numbers. However, the US state of Colorado may buck that trend by electing a candidate for Governor whose campaign video describes him as a ‘data telecom executive’ for the last 25 years. John Brooks (pictured outside the Colorado State Capitol building) worked 13 of those years at Subex, the Indian business that became a world leader in the supply of revenue assurance and fraud management (RAFM) systems to telcos. Now John is contesting the primary that will decide the Republican Party’s candidate for Governor of Colorado. His campaign defines him as the kind of Republican who gets along with Democrats and independents because they trust him to look at ‘all sides of an issue’.
Employees of Subex like to style themselves as Subexians, a term which suggests they form a special bond and obtain a different perspective on the world. If that means they make decisions based upon robust data about how well a policy will work in practice then I hope we see plenty of Subexians in government. There is no explicit mention of using data to set policy priorities in John’s manifesto. However, there are hints of the same thinking that inspired Subex’s groundbreaking concept of the Revenue Operations Center (ROC). For example, the manifesto promises to “bring several innovative ideas and plans to rethink revenue models that will improve logistics revenues”. John also makes the following pledge:
In my executive background I have introduced 24×7 fiscal oversight programs for hundreds of large corporations around the world, many having budgets 3-4 times larger than Colorado’s budget. We will digitize the state budget, so every Coloradan can see state money collected and where it is being spent. We will also deploy continuous, automated audits of all state services and offices and provide transparency.
That sounds a lot like creating ROC-style assurance of government taxes and spending!
John is not the first RAFM executive to contemplate a career in politics. Rui Paiva was the CEO of Subex’s chief RAFM rivals, WeDo, before it was foolishly sold by their parent company to American private equity vultures. In the 2019 Portuguese parliamentary elections, Rui stood as one of the lead regional candidates for Liberal Initiative, a third way party that advocates for increased liberty and reduced government intervention. He was unsuccessful but I would not be surprised if Rui leverages his considerable social media following to compete for votes in future. Both firms advocated for the significant efficiency gains that can be unlocked by gathering, examining and acting upon data, across a variety of business sectors as well as telecoms. The mutual respect still felt by the leaders of these pioneering RAFM companies was evidenced by a recent social media exchange between Rui and Vinod Kumar, former CEO of Subex.
My biggest frustration with communications providers is that the people who run them do not ground their decisions in data, despite having access to enormous amounts of it, some of which is sold to other businesses. Most executives in the communications sector just second-guess what shareholders might want, and shareholders second-guess what other potential shareholders might want, with the result that businesses are wasteful, mistake-prone and make irrational decisions about how to allocate capital that are rooted in ill-informed prejudices rather than evidence of what works in actual practice. But to be fair, that is exactly how politicians select policies that will appeal to voters. None of us will fix the flaws inherent to capitalism or democracy because they are derived from the flaws inherent to human nature, but at least we could try to limit the squandering of money or the sprawl of bureaucracies that fail to meet their objectives. Voting for people like Brooks and Paiva might be a good way to start.
The Colorado primaries will be held on June 30, 2026, and voting for the Governor will conclude on November 3. John Brooks’ campaign website can be found here.
