The government has launched various initiatives to make data more accessible and valuable to constituents and stakeholders. As a result, federal chief information, data and technology officials have had to implement multiple efforts to transform data into more valuable assets. Chief Data Officer Justin Marsico at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and Michael Holck, vice president for Software Engineering at ICF, joined Scoop News Group to discuss some of these efforts in a recent interview.

Marsico explains that the Bureau manages the federal government’s financial operations, including dispersing payments, collecting revenue, and conducting government-wide accounting on top of auctioning Treasury securities and savings bonds.

“As you can see, there is a lot of information and data that needs to be exchanged with federal agencies to make all of this right,” says Marsico. “One of the biggest challenges we have is accessing and using our data internally…when we’re trying to answer basic questions about our finances, our HR — it often takes much manual effort to get those answers. So that’s one of the things that I’ve been focused on is partnering with our HR area in our CFO office to figure out how to get data faster and where it needs to go so that we can do analytics with a faster time to market.”

Marsico also shares his insights on maximizing data use and sharing — including steps to allowing analytics and processing to be done where the data already resides instead of moving data to outside tools and platforms and how feasible it is as a concept in the federal government.

Marsico says an “all-of-the-above” approach makes sense, and agencies should find what works for them, but the feasibility depends on the type of legacy systems already in place. He also emphasizes the importance of establishing clear roles and responsibilities for data sharing to prevent people from defaulting to a safe position of saying “no” and resorting to informal channels for sharing data.

Holck adds perspective about developments now available to help agencies make data more accessible and insightful for federal employees. He highlights, for instance, how data format standardization and containerization make it easier to move analytics tools to the data using tools like Docker and workflow definition languages.

“By sharing that kind of analytics, tools, knowledge and process, you’re giving the building blocks to the other people in the community to do the same analytics and to build on top of what you’ve done. By allowing them to stand on your shoulders, they may discover novel insights you never even considered,” says Holck.

Holck also says that agencies are using common standardized APIs to access data. He gives an example of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard in healthcare, which enables organizations to access data from different systems and write analytical tools that can run wherever the API exists.

Watch the interview to learn more about making data readily available and usable and unlocking data as a strategic asset.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by ICF.

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The U.S. government has issued several initiatives to make government data more widely accessible and helpful — including the Federal Data Strategy, the Evidence Act, and the Open Government Data Act, among others.

For chief federal information, data and technology officials, that has meant concerted efforts to implement governance policies to transform data into more valuable products for their constituents and stakeholders.

Laura Biven, data science technical lead in the Office of Data Science Strategy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and John Auerbach, senior vice president for public health at ICF, joined FedScoop for a discussion on best practices in capturing greater intelligence from data.

Biven highlights how data-rich science biomedical research is and says, “many of the institutes and centers across NIH steward and own their data repositories where researchers can access valuable datasets for their research.” It’s NIH’s role to help researchers access and use data effectively. She explains how they follow a guiding principle that envisions a modernized biomedical data ecosystem—called FAIR, or “findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data.”

She also touches on the challenges they face and says, “interoperability [between datasets] is still very hard and requires not just a sort of harmonization of the different types of data and the way that those data are organized, but also harmonization between the platforms where they live.”

“We have a number of different programs and practices to help us make data interoperable…and putting most of our data assets in the cloud allows different resources researchers to access those data regardless of their where they are geographically and to participate in large-scale collaborations around those data,” she adds.

Auerbach adds his perceptions about the progress he sees with health agencies at the federal and state level and says, “there are multiple efforts underway to make data more accessible as well as accurate and timely. Virtually all the federal and the state health agencies are now engaged in activities to strengthen their data systems.”

But he also calls out the need for sustainable resources, upskilling the workforce to transform and maintain data and IT systems and ensuring data systems are updated, supported and aligned at the state, local, tribal and territorial levels in both the healthcare and public health sectors.

Watch the interview to learn more about making data readily available and usable and learn more about unlocking data as a strategic asset.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by ICF.

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As part of the U.S. government’s Federal Data Strategy, agencies are working hard to transform data insights into action and make data more accessible and valuable to a broader circle of users.

For chief data officers and IT leaders, that involves taking numerous steps to advance the collection and management of data and transform data into more valuable products for their constituents and stakeholders

In a recent FedScoop interview, Beth Puchek,chief data officer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, discusses some best data management practices and how they can propel missions forward or, in their absence, hold missions back.

“USCIS data is everybody’s job; nobody owns it. The most important thing we can do is to promote that mindset and to help everyone understand the importance of sharing data across our domains across our lines of business,” she says.

“One of the ways we’ve seen to solidify that in people’s minds is through the use of an enterprise data strategy. Four years ago, we published our first data strategy. And it’s a great opportunity for us to all collectively synchronize around the data management challenges that we have and the ultimate vision for utilizing our data as an asset collectively,” she adds.

ICF Digital Modernization Chief Data Officer Joshua Phillips says, “it’s important to consider data a mission-critical product in its own right, rather than to think of only the reports, visualizations, or tools that use that data. That product thinking helps ensure that the proper attention to data quality and interoperability is applied and maintained over time.”

He also highlights technology solutions that support data access, like event-based streaming, bulk transfer mechanisms and federated data lakes. “With these data-as-a-product principles and modern data access mechanisms, agencies can more readily meet mission objectives.”

Puchek and Phillips also explore where the cloud helps to create and scale a cohesive data management environment that supports a wide range of data workloads.

Watch the interview to hear how to navigate a data-driven ecosystem.

Learn more about unlocking data as a strategic asset here.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group and FedScoop and underwritten by ICF.

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