Page 25 - FCW, Sept/Oct 2018
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   That push toward a centralized approach is continuing in the current administration, with ‘reshaping federal IT’ among its key priorities. The goal is to empower agency- and department-level CIOs to identify existing data, catalog it properly, and store it on sharable platforms.
“As you’re moving out of physical data centers, what better opportunity to start taking a look at your applications?” said Rubin, who was part of several modernization projects while working for the Justice Department. “You can think about how to modernize those applications and enter a shared- service platform, taking full advantage of the cloud so your data is no longer restricted to an individual application.”
EMBRACING A NEW DATA STRATEGY AND CULTURE
Department-level governance is an important aspect of overhauling data practices, establishing an information management strategy, knowing who owns what data, and establishing data steward roles to ensure that data is managed correctly. Information needs to be identified, classified, and tagged with attributes and markings, including access controls.
“Data is everything,” Rubin said. “When you manage it as an enterprise asset, you must take a different approach in how you establish and enforce business rules.”
To successfully embrace a new data strategy, it’s imperative that the effort includes participation at every level, especially with so many legacy applications and systems.
“The key thing is buy-in from mission and IT stakeholders, the folks who understand and work with the data daily, the stewards that oversee the assets, and IT who is the custodian of the assets. Ideally this results in a cross-functional governance structure with the appropriate policies, compliance, and stewardship responsibilities to sustain the data ecosystem.” Rubin said.
Awareness and education around the initiatives is crucial along with the knowledge of how to
pull those equities in and bring them to the table.
Strong top-level executive and mission support to understand any information-sharing challenges is also crucial, he said.
What’s also needed is an open data culture to
get people aligned and in place in the right roles, adds Homme. With more data scientists and data managers in demand throughout the various layers of government, attracting and retaining employees will be an ongoing challenge.
EXTRACTING THE REAL VALUE OF DATA
Once government details the location and owners of data, it can better transform that data into sharable and actionable formats as is done with data.gov, a web portal providing open data – from 284,067 data sets at last count – for research or to develop apps or data visualizations.
“Government is striving for the ability to use data for better decision-making and to improve the way it interacts with citizens,” Homme said.
The challenge isn’t only about making the data actionable but accelerating the speed of data becoming actionable. Take, for example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) RadResponder Network, a collaboration among FEMA, the Department of Energy (DoE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that uses a flexible architecture enabling federal, state, local, and tribal organizations to aggregate and share radiological data quickly and securely.
RadResponder links agencies that would collaborate in the event of a nuclear disaster. It allows users to better manage a crisis by accessing the network from the field – via smartphone, tablet, or the web – to get accurate data in real time.
“It’s essential for agencies to have the ability to share data; and at the state and local level as well,” Homme said. “RadResponder is one of many compelling use cases for why interoperability is critical.”
Another example of extracting the real value of data to better serve citizens is the EPA’s AirNow app, which provides current air quality conditions in about 400 locations, including Hawaii during the Kilauea volcanic eruption.
  















































































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