2019 Federal Data Strategy: Prioritizing Data as a Strategic Asset

By Toné Mason, Senior Analyst

In June of 2019, an update to the Federal Data Strategy was released including the final Principles and Practices and draft Year-1 Action Plan. The final Year-1 Action Plan is anticipated to be released in September.

Vendors should understand what’s in the plan and make sure they adapt their sales strategies and messaging to address the new plan goals:

1. Enterprise Data Governance – The federal government needs to have a plan for how to best protect their data. This includes the formation of data policies, data protection strategies and a way to monitor for compliance. Quality and integrity of data will need to be protected and monitored as best as possible.
2. Access, Use and Augmentation – Ensuring continuous and reliable access to data will be vital. Additionally, it will be key to make the visualization of data as user-friendly as possible and ensure that proper information silos are in place, whether for an application for the public or for soldiers on the ground.
3. Decision Making & Accountability – There are vast amounts of diverse types of data currently not being utilized. Preparing this data to be consumed can be extremely challenging. Transforming this data into actionable, real-time intelligence to inform decision making is the end goal and is even more challenging.
4. Commercialization, Innovation and Public Use – Making federal data assets available to external stakeholders in an easy-to-use format is a key priority. This will facilitate the creation of new applications where advanced technologies and visualization techniques can be applied to transform the data into useful, consumable information for a wide range of use cases.

Potential use cases for this data are endless and only limited to one’s imagination. Use cases range from facilitating a platform to share legal data between jurisdictions that enables more rapid decision making, to using data from programs to accurately judge how effective those programs are and who they are helping.

The key focus areas for Year-1 are anticipated to be:

• The development and sharing of government-wide resources and/or tools for implementing the Federal Data Strategy related to governance, ethical data management and use, data protection, workforce training, streamlined access to federal data assets, and the establishment of data inventories and data cataloging.
• Improvement of the management and use of specific data asset portfolios including geospatial data and financial management data.
• How agencies can support their missions and serve stakeholders by enhancing the usability of the federal government’s full portfolio of data assets. Agencies will be investing in necessary infrastructure improvements, including workforce training and improvements related to data protection and access.

While only a draft plan has been released, vendors have an opportunity to engage federal agencies now as they build their plans to support the Federal Data Strategy.

Reach out to the Market Intelligence team to see how you can engage with federal agencies on their data strategies.

Hear more about the federal data revolution at the 6th Annual Government IT Sales Summit on November 21, 2019 in Reston, Virginia.