Noting that the Federal Data Strategy is not yet complete and will be released soon, Lucas Hitt, chief of the communications division at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, offered a preview of some of the potential action steps in the strategy’s Year 1 Action Plan.
Speaking at FCW’s Data & Analytics Summit today, Hitt shared a slide that listed several “potential action steps” for the draft action plan that will be released this month for comment, and finalized in August. The action plan will include around 16 activities, said Hitt, and will be updated annually.
“The idea here is that these action plans fit into sort of three basic categories. First there are shared, government-wide action plans. These are going to be actions that are assigned, for example, to [the Office of Management and Budget], or [the General Services Administration], or in some cases a specific agency that’s being asked to take on a particular task on behalf of the government as a whole,” said Hitt.
“You also have cross-agency groups … for example, [the Interagency Committee on Standards Policy] is likely to be assigned a specific task related to developing a data protection toolkit,” he added.
“And then there are going to be the agency-specific activities that each agency will have to do. For example, before we can really approach meaningful data governance across government, we’ll need agencies to at least have agency-wide data governance structures, and build that basic infrastructure in place,” Hitt finished.
On the slide, potential action steps included:
- Create a Data Council
- Develop a Data Ethics Framework
- Develop a Data Protection Toolkit
- Improve Geospatial Data Standards
- Identify Priority Datasets to Support Artificial Intelligence R&D
- Identify Data Needs to Answer Key Agency Questions
- Identify Priority Datasets for Agency Open Data Plans
The slide did not note which agencies would be responsible for implementation.
Hitt noted that the new guidance and laws, such as the AI Executive Order or the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, will be “pushed through the prism” of the Federal Data Strategy’s annual action plan.
In addition to the action plan, the Federal Data Strategy will finalize the practices it encourages, which are meant to serve as aspirational goals for a five to 10-year horizon, Hitt said.