Here's a choice of soundbites from a recent conference on government procurement. You can have Karen Pica from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) saying: “There is never a dull moment with data standards.” Or you can have the Defense Department's Paul Brubaker saying: “I think we need to flip the conversation. What outcomes do we want in government and do we have the datasets?”
I don't know if Pica's quote got laughs. I hope Brubaker's got lots of nods. His point was that rather than trying to collect more and more data, agencies need to decide on their goals and then collect the data which supports those goals.
Not all the glistering data we happen to have is gold. Why would it be? The data we have is the product of past designed processes. If those processes don't intersect with other areas of interest, then the data can have no relevance to them. And even when process areas overlap, the data collected for one purpose may well not serve any other purpose. Federal Times
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