The time to update the federal data strategy is now

The Office of Management and Budget in 2020 and 2021 teamed with agency chief information officers and chief data officers to issue the federal data strategy and action plans, laying out a 10-year vision for the government to accelerate its use of data to better deliver on its mission, serve the public, and steward resources. 

We are now halfway through that trajectory. Not only has the operational and technology landscape fundamentally shifted, in many cases progress as envisioned by the Foundations of Evidence-based Policymaking Act has stalled. OMB has stopped efforts to provide annual guidance, integrating its assessment of progress. Further, the current administration’s executive orders put into stark relief the gap between the potential of public-sector data sharing to improve performance and prevent fraud, and the reality. 

However, CDOs and their agency counterparts have accomplished much and learned from initial efforts. The challenge is that their efforts are not aligned, integrated, or leveraged against governmentwide priorities or agency resource allocation and performance management activities. Authorities, accountability and appropriation for responsible and effective use of information resources are confused between the CDO and CIO roles and not effectively integrated into agency investment review processes.

This must change an aligned and resourced focus on responsibly harmonizing and automating data collection, access, sharing, linking, and use policy; federated data management and integration; and data workforce capacity building. These capabilities in turn will more than pay for themselves through the ability to align federal, state, and local programs on common, high-value, and high-integrity data and outcome measures. They will enable the use of interoperable common data as a way to collapse redundant and outdated systems and empower artificial intelligence dominance. Finally, they will support improved cybersecurity and continuous audit of data access and use through acceleration of interoperable zero-trust implementations.

For example, consider laudable proposals for reforming the Paperwork Reduction Act. What is missing from the discussion is the real opportunity to make progress on implementing the once-only principle. This would be done by leveraging agency progress with data governance and data catalogs to accelerate reuse of systematically linked and entity-resolved common data to collect information only once, and reuse it broadly to reduce burden and improve experience with government services. This provides a new pathway for meaningful reform and improvement within and between OMB and agencies on this topic, to be developed in an updated federal data strategy. It also goes a long way — maybe all the way — toward preparing agency data to be AI ready.

Indeed, most recognize the importance of customer experience. But the Evidence Act and modern approaches to data management open the aperture to the entire citizen’s journey, looking at improving experience and impact over their lifetime. How is this possible without a strategic focus on the underlying data and responsibly reusing it at the individual and population level? It’s not! What is needed is to work back from all the moments that matter along the citizen’s journey with the government, to identify opportunities to reuse data and automate harmonized policy guardrails, and then to build and use data products that improve both experience and program outcomes.

OMB has the pen on updating the federal data strategy and accompanying action plans, and ensuring placement in an integrated approach to allocating resources, improving information resources management, and improving performance of agencies. OMB should ask the federal CDO Council to develop substantive input toward an updated data strategy, building on agency open-data efforts that engage the public, including with industry, state and local CDOs, and policy advocates. This approach will align the strategy update with agency missions under administration guidance. It can also tighten focus on sharing, linking, and using agency data to instrument OMB’s resource and performance management of agencies and their programs. 

Implementation of the updated federal data strategy will set incentives toward learning and ongoing improvement including with AI. It will do this because of authoritative data-instrumenting for common data, and key measures that agency and program leaders need to operate. The same data and measures then will be used by OMB and White House policy councils to drive a virtuous cycle of learning, improvement, and accountability, amplified by open data and transparency imperatives in the Evidence Act. It also readies high-quality, integrated and curated common data to support responsible integration of AI into federal efforts to drive efficiencies and improve performance.

Kshemendra Paul served in a variety of federal agencies and the White House in roles such as assistant inspector general, governmentwide lead for information sharing, federal chief architect, program manager, and chief data officer.