Though the Federal Data Strategy Draft Action Plan is a promising start for the Federal government to fully leverage the value of data, industry and academic officials have their own notions about advancing the use of government data to improve strategies and processes. The importance of culture change around data, data literacy, and data standardization were common ideas among the many challenges in implementing the Federal Data Strategy expressed by industry and academic officials at the Data Coalition and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) co-sponsored public forum on Monday, July 8.
During the forum, 52 speakers from business, academic, and non-profit stakeholders provided input on the 16 items in the Federal Data Strategy Draft Action Plan, suggesting how the Federal government should undertake implementing the data strategy over the next year. Many industry and academic officials emphasized ideas about the importance of changing the culture around data, improving data literacy, and creating strong data standards.
One of the challenges to implementing the strategy that industry and academic officials agreed on is the creation of strong data standards to ensure that stakeholders can effectively and efficiently access and use data. Many officials, like Charles Rothwell, the retired director of the National Center for Health Statistics, proposed collaboration efforts between Federal agencies and the private sector to ensure data is accessible and used appropriately.
“We need to have government and vendors and other private sector folks to come with strong data standards so that we can use it within government and make the data available, so there isn’t inappropriate use of it.” Rothwell said.
Officials also pointed out the need for cultural change around data and “making sure everyone is able to leverage the data and what comes out of it,” as Heather Gittings described, a Senior Director of Public Sector and Health Care at Qlik.
GrantSolutions, a shared service provider for grant management solutions in the Federal government, sees one of the big challenges for the cultural change around data to be “aligning partner stakeholders on why sharing their data is important” according to Renee Lobanovskyy, a program specialist at GrantSolutions.
“This alignment starts with getting leadership buy in,” she said. “A huge part of that is going to be getting everyone to see the value proposition of the data and how to leverage it as a strategic asset.” GrantSolutions has been working with its Partner agencies to help them leverage publicly available data as a strategic asset through the use of its newest tool, Recipient Insight. GrantSolutions Recipient Insight, available to all Federal PIV card holders, puts key information for 750,00 organizations at users’ fingertips to deliver the most comprehensive risk analysis tool available for safeguarding the expenditure of grant funding.
Beyond leveraging data, officials also emphasized the importance of data standards and the current lack of digital and data literacy amongst decision makers. More than half of the speakers at the event suggested that the data strategy could do more to encourage data standards across all aspects of the Federal government.
The Federal Data Strategy Action Plan will be finalized and publicly released in the coming months. It will incorporate comments from this joint public form and other feedback provided to OMB.
