Page 15 - FCW, August 2019

Trending 2 years is the length of the budget cap suspension agreed to by PresidentTrump and congressional leaders
OMB ties evidence-based policymaking to budget planning
White House
moves forward
on data strategy
The Office of Management and Budget and the Data Coalition gathered more than 50 experts in early July to discuss how to implement the White House’s new Federal Data Strategy.
The strategy’s action plan outlines 16 steps — some agency- specific, others governmentwide — to “establish a firm basis of tools, processes and capacities to leverage data as a strategic asset.”
The White House has set aggressive deadlines for the plan, including establishing an OMB Data Council by November, testing a governmentwide data catalog by May 2020 and identifying priority datasets at each agency by August 2020. The plan also seeks to improve standards for geospatial and financial data and identify opportunities to increase data skills in the federal workforce.
The creation of an OMB Data Council “is long overdue,” said Charles Rothwell, former director of the National Center for Health Statistics. Although the plan calls for the OMB council to be created by November, it also requires agencies to launch their own councils in a month.
“To me, that timing is backwards,” Rothwell said. “The OMB Data Council should serve as a model for department-level” agencies.
Clifton Roberts, Intel’s global director of cloud and data policy, praised the larger goal of breaking down barriers between agency data and recommended that government and industry create a secure, federated, machine learning-based model for dealing with previously siloed data.
— Mark Rockwell
The Office of Management and Budget, in its voluminous A-11 document covering fiscal 2021 budget requests, establishes policy and deliverables for the recently passed Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act.
Robert Shea, a principal at Grant Thornton and a member of the board that drafted the recommendations that informed the act, said agencies must demonstrate some progress with their September budget submissions,
CDO position is a first step toward determining how an agency is going to improve its performance and identify data that could be harnessed for private-sector use. Additionally, unlike the CIO, the CDO must look horizontally across components to find insights into improving management and outcomes.
The other big piece of the A-11 document is the mandate to follow technology business management
principles for measuring and managing investments. It is the outcome of a process set in motion by Tony Scott when he served as U.S. CIO and Mader when he was OMB controller.
TBM is a set of industry best practices that could give top managers and
budget examiners at OMB a way to understand technology spending across the entire government. Officials in the Obama and Trump administrations have been encouraging the adoption of TBM for years, and now it’s no longer optional.
Mader said TBM was a logical follow-on to TechStat and PortfolioStat, the OMB-based technology investment oversight efforts.
“TechStat was limited by data sources, so what TBM does is basically standardize a set of terminologies and focuses on specific spending categories,” he added. “That allows Cabinet secretaries to look at ‘what have I got’ and ‘what am I spending it on.’”
Mader also said it could be time for the government to develop a contract vehicle to pre-qualify vendors to supply TBM services to agencies.
including the appointment of chief data officers (CDOs).
“By September, agencies generally need to show the approach they’re taking to assessing their capacity to gather and use evidence and develop a learning agenda — what evaluations they’re going to conduct to deepen their insights into whether their programs are working,” Shea said.
Agencies aren’t required to make new hires. For instance, Justice Department CIO Joe Klimavicz was designated the CDO at his agency in May, but Shea said the law envisions a stand-alone role for the CDO.
Dave Mader, former controller at OMB and now a chief strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, agrees that being a CDO is a full-time job. “It’s intended to be as stand-alone position, not a dual-hat role” for a CIO, he added. “I don’t think anybody can do both of those jobs.”
Mader said the creation of a
— Adam Mazmanian
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