Page 6 - FCW, January/February 2021

IT Modernization
Game Changing Technology to Meet Agency Missions
Data Management Drives Major Modernizations opportunities
The Federal Data Strategy gives government the foundation it needs to use
them navigate the management of it.
This is especially important given data’s proliferation. The total amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide reached 59 zettabytes in 2020, according to Statista, while research firm IDC predicts that 175 zettabytes of new data will be created in 2025. Agencies must be able to determine what datasets and points are important to their missions
GameChanger
For years, the focal point of government information technology modernization has been the cloud. And that’s with good reason: Cloud brings flexibility, scalability and support for other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence that legacy systems simply can’t provide. But another common element runs through all modernization efforts: data. Without it, agencies can’t fully understand where they are – or where they want to be.
and what’s noise.
That’s where the relationship between
Recognizing that, the federal government has taken steps to put
data front and center. In March 2018,
the President’s Management Agenda
set a Cross-Agency Priority Goal of “Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset,” which called for the development of the Federal Data Strategy. Issued in 2019, the strategy’s mission “is to fully leverage the value of federal data for mission, service and the public good by guiding the federal government in practicing ethical governance, conscious design and a learning culture.”
during combat operations, just as school board officials rely on data to determine when it’s safe to reopen schools in the face of a public-health emergency.
The strategy set 10 principles in three areas – ethical governance, conscious design and learning culture – to guide agencies on data use and protection in
the next 10 years. It also established 40 practices to promote a data-centered culture in government and 20 action steps for 2020. As of Sept. 30, 2020, agencies had met 16 milestones, including
the debut of a metadata management tool pilot test at the General Services Administration and the completion by 20 agencies of their initial data maturity assessment.
Besides laying a foundation for how agencies use data, the strategy also helps
data and modern IT becomes most apparent. To wade through the data, government needs tools such as AI and automation that can analyze and visualize data in real time or near real time so that officials can make data-driven, fact-based decisions. For example, military leaders require the latest accurate information
Government workers have long recognized the importance of data to mission attainment and growth. Now, the Federal Data Strategy provides them with a consolidated way forward.
Highlights of the Federal Data Strategy
• The conscientious design principles of ensuring relevance, harnessing existing data, anticipating future uses and demonstrating responsiveness are similar to DevOps principles in that both are about designing with the intent for a desired state and defining infrastructure and applications based on that state.
• Ensuring that data is relevant, harnessing existing data and considering future use cases are other important principles. They allow for rapid, automated feedback in telemetry that can be piped back into the process to refine and enhance it.
• Taken together, the principles support an infrastructure technology stack and operating model that lets agencies build and deploy services quickly and with awareness of the desired target. They provide a playbook to accelerate data sharing, modernization and infrastructure.