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Strategic Objective
Collaborate with the business community to provide more timely, accurate, and relevant data products and services for all our customers (ESA, NOAA)
Strategic Objective
Overview
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.
Read Less...Progress Update
The Department of Commerce is striving to produce data that meets the needs of future society by making more weather, climate, and scientific data available (see NOAA’s initiatives under Strategic Objective 4.1) and by making necessary changes in its economic data products and services. In FY 2014, ESA decided to co-locate the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) with the Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland, so that the two agencies can work more closely together on collecting, compiling, and disseminating economic statistics. Additionally, the Department has created a Big Data Center at Census, a research and testing center that focuses on government-wide federal economic data, to include GDP and labor and unemployment statistics.
In FY 2014, DOC made progress toward collaborating with external partners to provide timely, accurate, and relevant data products and services for customers.
Accomplishments include:
- ESA conducted a national listening tour to hear the views of state and local governments, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations on the future of economic statistics
- Completed an inventory of data gaps in various BEA statistical products
- Identified three primary areas where private sector data sources would be beneficial to improve measures of consumer spending (see, e.g., http://www.bls.gov/osmr/symp2013_landefeld.pdf)
- Participated in NYU GovLab’s Open Data 500
- Submitted acquisition package to support expanded outreach efforts
- Established Big Data Center at Census and through it began to explore big data analytic initiatives.
- Approved prototype of “Open for Business” tool
- Submitted acquisition package to support “Open for Business” focus groups.
Next Steps in FY 2015:
- FY2015Q1 – Determine feasibility of establishing a Federal Advisory Committee for economic statistics, the Commission on the Future of Economic Data (CFED)
- FY2015Q2 – Establish CFED: a group of economic data visionaries to provide short-term, medium-term, and long-term recommendations with a 3-5 month information gathering, research and evaluation period; 4 month analysis and writing; and final report by January 31, 2016
- FY2015Q4 – Explore potential to incorporate “sharing economy” into existing or new economic indicators
- FY2015Q4 – Identify and contact possible data partners to perform preliminary evaluation of new data sources
- FY2015Q4 – Continue executing plans for smooth transition and move of BEA to Suitland by July 2016
- FY2015Q4 – Based on R&D research with University of Michigan, build products or APIs that universities can use to augment the economic effectiveness of their research efforts (see Strategic Objective 4.2 for more about the underlying research and testing project).
