Federal Government Information Technology

Sorting dirty data is the final hurdle in leveraging analytics

Federal Times: In May, agency leaders and governance stakeholders gathered in a hotel ballroom in Cambridge, Maryland, to figure how they could solve the federal government’s most pressing problems with the chic, instrument du jour of public policy: analytics.

In a roundtable session at ACT-IAC’s Management of Change conference, Johan Bos-Beijer, director of analytics services for the General Services Administration’s Office of the Associate Administrator, split the ballroom’s attendees into seven tables and tasked them to answer four questions:

    What are the key drivers for needing analytics?
    What emerging challenges should be addressed by analytics?
    What types of analytics will be important to the future?
    Why?

Once the questions were posed, the tables began buzzing with possibility. Could better analytics solve issues with student loan debt? Workforce challenges? Immigration, health care, mission delivery?

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