Chief Data Officers’ Council Seek Public Comments on Data Proficiency Efforts to Close Federal Skills Gap
The Federal Chief Data Officers (CDO)’s CDO Council released a Request for Information (RFI) on the Federal Register requesting public commentary on agency data storage procedures that supports intergovernmental collaboration while maintaining confidentiality. On October 14, 2021, the Council held its first public meeting, providing the progress achieved under the Federal Data Strategy (Strategy) – a 10-year plan to accelerate the federal use of data.
The Council seeks federal employees, contractors, and stakeholders to share their perspectives in the following categories of issues: Data Skills and Workforce Development, Data Inventory, Data Sharing, Value and Maturity, Ethics and Equity, and Technology.
Further, the RFI provides guiding questions in each area, including:
· What is the best implementation of a data inventory you have seen? What are the characteristics that made it so successful?
How might we collaborate to incorporate public sector data and topics into data training curricula?
How can we raise awareness of the value of data governance and data management to achieve agency value?
How can we leverage Federal Data ethics to improve trust and transparency?
What frameworks should agencies use to evaluate their existing data infrastructure and to modernize technology with capabilities that break down organizational data silos and ensure the best available data is available?
The Council, founded in January 2020, forms workgroups on operations, data sharing, and data inventory to communicate proposed changes to the Strategy team effectively. According to Council Chairman Ted Kaouk, agencies need a concise way to leverage data to achieve the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better Agenda, which requires data management infrastructure in addition to federal workforce training.
“Recent executive orders of the Biden-Harris administration really reinforced the need for quality data to tackle some of the nation’s biggest challenges, and again, signal that holistic reexamination of the federal government’s practices for collecting, using, sharing and disseminating data,” stated Chairman Kaouk.
According to Kaouk, the federal government must improve their data utilization as technology continues to modernize, and the progress of such hinges on ethical data practices and robust privacy protections “to give added confidence to our data sharing and dissemination activities.”
Despite these efforts, CDOs face two consistent obstacles: workforce training and a range of data literacy. The Strategy requires agencies to update their workforce’s skills in information technology (IT) and business expertise to succeed in their action plans. At present, the CDO has a playbook in the works that outlines a CDO’s short and long-term efforts to address training issues – it does not address the accessibility of intergovernmental data.
“More and more, we see the value of government data in the commercial sector, both in regulated entities, as well as the tech and data sectors, huge growth in taking data through organizations like the Department of Commerce, and the National Weather Service, and adding additional value to that data, and serving it back in the form of enhanced weather capabilities,” stated Tod Dabolt, Head of the Council’s committee on Data Inventory and serves as the Department of the Interior’s CDO.
The Council will consider comments that address these critical obstacles received by November 15, 2021.
“Everyone should be encouraged to contribute perspectives on the foundational elements of data governance, including ethical uses of data, approaches for improving equity, and advances in data sharing approaches,” stated Nick Hart, President of the Data Foundation.
