Commerce Issues its First Data Strategy

In a move so many federal agencies are taking, the Department of Commerce released its first data strategy this past summer. Dubbed “America’s Data Agency” by the strategy, Commerce must provide sound data governance, and reliable, accessible and comprehensive data to achieve its mission. As such, the strategy serves as the department’s top guidance in achieving optimal data practices and initiatives from FY 2021 to 2024.

“Enabled by new technology and data governance, the execution of this strategy will maximize the value of data as a return on taxpayer investments and provide increased competitive advantage to U.S. businesses and research institutions,” according to the document and serving as the strategy’s ultimate vision.

The data strategy centers on five strategic goals, which will depend on one another to achieve strategy success:

The strategy document expands on the goals outlining objectives, guiding principles and a vision for each. Objectives under the goals, out of the 20 listed within the strategy, include identifying the data and technology needed for evidence-based decision-making, building a comprehensive data inventory, reducing data ingest to insight cycles, training to develop a data literate workforce, and promoting the use of geospatial data. Many of these objectives hold pockets of opportunity for contractors to assist the department in fulfilling the strategy’s goals.

Examples of top data initiatives ongoing at the department include NOAA’s Big Data Program (BDP). BDP rests on cooperative agreements with vendors to provide commercial cloud platforms in exchange for public access to NOAA data. Within the next few years, NOAA plans to evolve the Big Data Program into an enterprise-wide service called the NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) to provide worldwide access to NOAA’s data for research purposes.

Moreover, the Bureau of Census is working to expand the Census Data Lake (CDL), a high performance and cloud-based repository housing and processing data from several systems and platforms. In the future, the bureau plans to utilize open source tools and optimized infrastructure to accelerate computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies within the CDL.

Looking ahead, the Commerce Chief Data Officer (CDO), Evaluation Officer and Statistical Official will lead departmental data initiatives and strategic goal efforts, states the strategy’s document. Furthermore, the department established a Commerce Data Governance Board, comprised of the Commerce CDO, bureau CDOs, and data stewards and architects throughout the agency. The board, according to the document, will be responsible for setting the policy and initiatives to implement the strategy moving forward.