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Strategic Objective

Improve data based services, decision-making and data sharing within the Department and with other parts of the Federal Government. (ESA, BEA, Census, BIS, ITA, MBDA)

Strategic Objective

Themes:

General Science, Space, and Technology

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Overview
Progress Update

Overview

The federal government collects vast amounts of data every day to support, protect, and defend the American public. Data can and should be used to drive program excellence and sound decision-making within the federal government. Data can be used more widely to help measure the efficacy of a wide variety of government assistance programs, allowing policy makers to make better and wiser choices on how best to spend limited resources. In other cases, data can be better shared or combined between agencies to make government programs more informed and more efficient.

Progress Update

The Department of Commerce (DOC) is simultaneously advancing several initiatives aimed at making government more efficient through better use of existing data. Initiatives include conducting a more efficient 2020 Decennial Census by maximizing the use of technology, such as the Geographic Support System Initiative (GSS-I), to reduce costs while maintaining high quality; performing reviews of the way in which federal agencies incorporate existing data into their decision-making processes; and carrying out a comprehensive content review of the American Community Survey (ACS) with the intent of reducing respondent burden.

In FY 2014, DOC made progress toward improvement of data based services, decision-making, and data sharing within the Department and with other parts of the federal government.

Accomplishments include:

Commerce executed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under which Commerce’s Office of the Chief Economist will use existing data to assist DHS in executing its EB-5 visa program.
The Big Data Center at Census is using big data analytics to evaluate economic impact of government funded university research (for more about the Big Data Center see DOC Strategic Objective 4.3). Under a grant initiative with the University of Michigan, the Center is evaluating the economic impact of government-funded university research. The goal is to track progression by university staff involved in projects and identify created companies and programs that result from the funded research.
Commerce’s Office of the Chief Economist produced a Value of Government Data report.
Census’ Center for Economic Studies produced Phase 1 of a program administrative data assessment project for ITA’s Global Markets and MBDA.
Census continued its efforts to provide the most current, accurate, and complete address, feature, and boundary data to the Census Bureau’s customers and data users through GSS-I.
Census completed several steps toward ensuring the efficiency of the 2020 Decennial Census:
- Self-response and nonresponse follow-up data collection phases for the 2014 Census Test
- Systems readiness tests for 2014 Census Test
- Reported on rate of completion in four major research tracks
- Completed draft of Reengineered Address Canvassing Recommendation report.
Census conducted an ACS content review summit with the goal of minimizing respondent burden.

Next Steps in FY 2015:

FY2015Q1 – Complete Reengineered Address Canvassing Recommendation report

FY2015Q1 - BEA and OCE provide NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) guidance on regional impact analysis of MEP grants using BEA’s Regional Input-Output Model. (BEA/OCE).
FY2015Q2 – Center for Economic Studies will produce phase 2 of a program administrative data assessment project for ITA’s Global Market’s (Census).
FY2105Q3 – Produce a report on key private sector uses of the American Community Survey data to better understand the ACS’s utility.
FY2015Q3 – Complete 2015 researching and testing activities in support of the 2020 Census Operational Plan.
FY2015Q3 – Complete top-to-bottom review of ACS question and content review.
FY2015Q4 – Issue the 2020 Census Operational Plan announcing the major design decisions by September 2015.
FY2015Q4 - Produce a final report on DHS’s EB-5 program (1-yr from signature).
FY2015Q4 – Move toward centralizing Census’ information technology structure, CEDCap and CEDSCI.

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Strategic Goals

Strategic Goal:

Improve government, business, and community decisions and knowledge by transforming Department data capabilities and supporting a data-enabled economy.

Statement:

Improve government, business, and community decisions and knowledge by transforming Department data capabilities and supporting a data-enabled economy.

Strategic Objectives

Transform the Department’s data capacity to enhance the value, accessibility and usability of Commerce data for government, business and the public. (ESA, NOAA, NIST, NTIS)

Statement:

Transform the Department’s data capacity to enhance the value, accessibility and usability of Commerce data for government, business and the public. (ESA, NOAA, NIST, NTIS)

Description:

The Department of Commerce collects, stores, and analyzes a treasure trove of data, including data on the economy, our population, and our environment. This data is fundamental to our mission and is used for the protection of life and property and to enhance economic growth. However, the capacity to analyze and disseminate all that data is significantly constrained. To meet these needs, Commerce data must be accessible, useable, reliable, and comprehensive.

Barriers to accessing and using the data must be minimized in order to realize the potential value of the data Commerce collects, stores, and disseminates,. There are differing standards, methodologies, operations, infrastructures, websites, architecture, platforms, and formats that make it difficult to access, find, use, and combine data sets. Commerce will undertake a comprehensive effort to improve the interoperability of our own data, both through internally-adopted standards and Commerce-wide efforts to better integrate our own data and making Commerce data more accessible and usable to the public. Consistent with privacy and security considerations, Commerce is firmly committed to unleashing its untapped data resources in ways that best support downstream information access, processing, analytics, and dissemination.

Partnering with the private sector will increase the capacity of Commerce to release raw scientific and climate data that cannot be cost-effectively disseminated by the Federal government under current resource constraints. Public-private commitments to adhere to sets of common standards and architectures could also result in a powerful data platform that would help provide more widespread access to public data in usable forms. However, this infrastructure and its enabling standards will only work if they are developed collaboratively between the public and private sectors, partnering with each other. This increased openness and interoperability needs to start in house. Commerce will undertake a comprehensive effort to improve the interoperability of our own data, both through internally–adopted standards and Commerce-wide efforts to better integrate our own data.

In sum, Commerce will lead efforts to make sure government data is accessible in ways to make our businesses more competitive, our governments smarter, and our citizens more informed.

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Improve data based services, decision-making and data sharing within the Department and with other parts of the Federal Government. (ESA, BEA, Census, BIS, ITA, MBDA)

Statement:

Improve data based services, decision-making and data sharing within the Department and with other parts of the Federal Government. (ESA, BEA, Census, BIS, ITA, MBDA)

Description:

Learn More

Collaborate with the business community to provide more timely, accurate, and relevant data products and services for all our customers (ESA, NOAA)

Statement:

Collaborate with the business community to provide more timely, accurate, and relevant data products and services for customers (ESA, NOAA)

Description:

The demands for information change over time, reflecting the ever-changing nature of households, the economy, and our environment. For instance, our economy has gone through tectonic shifts over the past several decades, moving towards a more service-based, internationally-connected, and digitally-enabled economy. However, our data on these new, emerging portions of the economy have not kept pace. Likewise, we are not meeting our customers’ demands for more detailed data products in smaller geographic areas, such as information on regional and local economies or their changing environments. In many cases, the government has a responsibility to transform the data it collects into the most accessible and useable information possible to meet the needs of the public it serves. In other cases, the government is not best positioned to fully satisfy these needs. Consequently, many businesses have emerged to add value to available government data, transforming it in ways that help meet the vast and diverse public needs. We want to encourage this trend.

By partnering with the business community and the private sector at large, we will generate new data products helping grow current businesses and catalyze the development of new businesses. Through outreach to the business community and users, we will measure customer demand and determine what new data products to produce. Generating these new products will be done in one of three ways, depending on the nature of what is needed: (1) using in-house, traditional means and methods to produce new data products; (2) partnering with the private sector to couple its data with government data; or (3) providing government data in ways that are more useful to businesses and others so they can more easily combine it with their own private data resources.

Our business customers will be the first beneficiaries of this process. But the 90,000 governmental entities and nearly 320 million Americans that we serve will benefit from the new data products and services that are fueled by our efforts.

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