How agencies propel decision-making with data

Federal legislation, small wins and the pandemic are all driving a data-friendly culture in the public sector, but the biggest boon has been communication, experts said during a Jan. 31 online event.

“We dreamt big, but we started small and we basically said, ‘How can data and analytics solve our foreign policy challenges? How can we solve problems? How can we add value?’” Janice deGarmo, director of the State Department’s Office of Management Strategy and Solutions, said during the University of Maryland’s “The Future of Data Analytics in Government” panel.

As State’s first – and former – acting chief data officer (CDO), she helped establish the Center for Analytics and grow it from a staff of three data scientists to 150. Realizing that securing buy-in from all the department’s 100,000 employees worldwide was unlikely, deGarmo instead focused on asking leaders of agencies within State what they needed help with. Their work began with analyzing Iranian exports and has since addressed topics such as 5G and cybersecurity.

“With the Afghanistan drawdown and evacuation, my Center for Analytics was running a 60% task force for that, working across federal agencies,” deGarmo said. “For global COVID risk, and now as it’s morphed into getting vaccines out globally, we’re at the center of that data analysis. We’re working on diversity and inclusion issues so that we can track and baseline our workforce better. We’re working on how to be able to shift our global presence depending on our strategic priorities at any given time.”

Ted Kaouk, CDO at the Office of Personnel Management and chairman of the Federal CDO Council, took a similar tack when he was CDO at the Agriculture Department, where all administrative areas struggled with reaching across silos to gain access to timely data for decision-making.

“We had to address those challenges first by … engaging directly with our leadership and field leaders in terms of the questions that they had,” Kaouk said.

To connect data analysts to the questions – and figure out how to answer them – USDA assigned assistant CDOs to each of its seven mission areas and established a centralized analytics service. The agency had one template for dashboards across USDA so they had a common look and feel whether they were for enterprise or mission area-specific analytics. Over time, that centralized viewpoint helped identify frequently used analytics and analytics products that could be applied at other agencies, rather than having duplicative efforts.

“What we began to see is that data that was created for one purpose may be needed elsewhere,” Kaouk said.

That’s true of the efforts resulting from the Federal CDO Council, established by the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, which “requires agency data to be accessible and requires agencies to plan to develop statistical evidence to support policymaking,” and requires each agency to designate a CDO. The council’s 80-plus members meet regularly to establish best practices, promote data sharing among agencies and learn from one another.

The act went a long way toward legitimizing the CDO role, and the federal government took another pro-data step recently when it created an occupational series job classification for data science and data management.

“The release of a data science series or occupation within the federal government is, I think, a pretty significant step for us to codify that profession, to signal and support the need to recruit data scientists,” Kaouk said. “We’re seeing a tremendous need and demand signal from agencies, and so we want to communicate that.”

To address it, the council last year held its first governmentwide data scientist hiring event, which attracted more than 500 applicants in 48 hours and resulted in agencies finding 107 qualified candidates.

At State, employees can take data-centric courses such as data acumen for executives and data visualization using Tableau to reskill and upskill, deGarmo said. The department is also spotlighting data with Data at State, a one-stop self-service shop that brings together cleansed data for diplomats to use. It also has released its first enterprise data strategy, which has four pillars – analytics, governance management and technology – and an overarching theme of data culture.

“You cannot move the needle on a data culture without really investing in that,” deGarmo said. “Analytics are just one part of imbuing a data culture in a diverse organization, especially as big as the State Department.… Diplomacy has always historically been seen as an art. Data analytics is a science. We very specifically chose the word ‘data-informed’ to say that we are not replacing diplomacy. We are augmenting it. We are propelling decision-making.”

Federal agencies aren’t the only ones making data headway, added panelist Monica McEwen, a managing director at Deloitte’s Global Public Sector Analytics and Cognitive practice. State and local organizations are using data in ways they had not considered before the pandemic – for instance, to track the virus’ spread and vaccine rollout.

“COVID’s really brought a spotlight to the importance of data across all organizations, and I think it’s really accelerated what people are calling digital transformation, data modernization," McEwen said. "Data’s really become the most powerful asset that an organization has.”

Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia.