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didn’t have some of the other expendi- tures across a year of execution,” one participant said. “So that made some resources available. [But] we had to really think about operations being in different places.”
Security and other struggles that come with sharing
Much of the discussion focused on risks that must be managed when breaking down the data silos. Identity and access management was a central concern, but the group also stressed the second-order challenges that can catch agencies by surprise.
One of those is the work imposed on data owners in the name of shar- ing. Many legacy systems lack good data catalogs and metadata, several participants noted, and creating such resources after the fact is a heavy lift.
“They want to share that data,” one executive said of agency colleagues. “But they don’t want to spend the time to explain what that data is and what the different elements are so that they can use it because that’s taking time away from what their mission is.”
And with public-facing data, the ever-present need to ensure accuracy is now extending to downstream use of agency data by others. One partici- pant cited a recent case of competing visualizations of the spread of COVID- 19 based on government datasets: “The first thing I thought was that if I was the one sharing the data, I’d be getting hammered with, ‘Which data’s right?’”
Political blowback isn’t limited to the data sphere, another said, and “at some point you’ve got to terminate the transaction. But data seems a bit more pervasive. And so if you’re the authoritative source, then you’re going to get the questions that come with providing that.”
Perhaps most significant, the group said, is the enormous workload that can come with opening an organiza- tion’s data to outside users. “It’s kill- ing us,” one executive said. “There’s no way to understand that demand curve. The more insight and data we make available — which is good, right? — then there are more pivots and different needs. There are differ- ent datasets and different questions about the models themselves.” That volume and variety have made it near- ly impossible to give team members clearly defined responsibility areas, he added, so they just keep triaging and adapting in real time.
Training leaders to see data as a mission asset
The COVID crisis has put a new emphasis on certain data, but most participants said they still struggle to convince agency leaders to view data as a mission asset rather than a back-office resource. “We can’t be solving the data management problem; you’ve got to be solving the mission problem,” one official said. “So that’s how we talk about it more.”
Another said the challenge goes beyond messaging. Federal executives quickly learn to issue data calls, and “we condition [people] to not neces- sarily think and hunt data for them- selves. So when they are in a place where they are the owner of it, they don’t think about it as an asset.” It’s not a deliberate choice, he said. “It’s just learned behavior over the course of a career.”
The solution is simple, the group said, at least at the conceptual level: Identify the gaps, and show how bet- ter data management can bridge them. Then, as one participant said, your data “becomes something that is key to mission outcomes.” n
Participants
Jose Arrieta
CIO (now former), Department of Health and Human Services
Brian Bataille
Chief Data Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency
Melvin Brown II
Director, Enterprise Business Management Office, Small Business Administration
Charles Campbell
IT Program Manager, Massachusetts Port Authority
Gerald Caron III
Director of Enterprise Network Management, Bureau of Information Resource Management, Department of State
Michael Conlin
Chief Business Analytics Officer, Department of Defense
Edward Dowgiallo
SeniorTechnical Advisor, Office of InformationTechnology, Federal Transit Administration, Department of Transportation
Skip Farmer
SE Director, U.S. Public Sector, Rubrik
Tom Kennedy
Vice President, U.S. Public Sector, Rubrik
Preston Werntz
Chief Data Officer, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Justin Worrilow
Data and Artificial Intelligence Specialist, Microsoft
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy
K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The July 30 gathering
was underwritten by Rubrik, but the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither Rubrik nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their July 30 comments.
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