We have all run into the office cliché similar to the saying “if all you use is a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Another way of saying this is that if all you see are nails, anything looks like a hammer. In both cases, the focus of misunderstanding is based on overlooking the particularsRead… Read more »
Maintaining a diverse federal workforce and eliminating barriers to equal employment opportunity are not only required practices for federal agencies under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Management Directive 715, but are also crucial to encouraging a more effective and creative workforce with less internal strife. The private sector is now investing heavily in diversity programsRead… Read more »
This is an excerpt from our recent industry perspective, How Unified Data Architecture Can Revolutionize Analytics in Government. To read the full thing, head here. To see what a UDA can do to elevate business performance, look no further than the transportation industry. The airlines were one of the first to tackle the concept of growingRead… Read more »
Federal HR professionals with access to electronic employee databases typically have access to a wealth of so-called “structured” employee data, or information that can be quickly counted and analyzed in spreadsheet programs to create pivot tables and reports. Examples of structured HR data include employee salary and demographic information and employee survey responses, all ofRead… Read more »
For decades, OMB and Departments have been trying to trace federal grants and loans to specific places: cities, neighborhoods, farms, enterprise zones, individual houses or stores. The complexity of community development, economic development, rural development, job creation, or just accounting have plagued how funds can be traced. The purpose of tracing the money is toRead… Read more »
TechStat provides a solution-oriented approach to technical issues by leveraging best-practice research and open communications between functions that better serve OCTO, its sister agencies, and residents of the city.
This is a salute to my brethren from the liberal arts, but also anyone who has ever thought English composition class was useless. What is it about understanding how writing happens that is so boring even if writing itself is fun, especially if you have only 140 characters and are not bound by spelling orRead… Read more »
Last week, I explored how federal agencies can use HR data to build predictive models to evaluate and reduce costly employee turnover. An article published in Business Insider this month described how HR software company Workday built an app to help employers do just that. Workday claims its software can not only predict who isRead… Read more »
“Let’s make this an obsolete question [of big data],” exclaimed Stephen Goldsmith, both a Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Innovations of the American Government Program. Because honestly, why shouldn’t our legacy systems get to talk to one another? Frustrations chatted in theRead… Read more »
Technology is, literally, the air we live and breathe. Data is now collected in every interaction, from traffic monitoring, to your water bill, to your sleep patterns, to your preferences at the grocery store. But what does this mean for government efficiency? All of this newly collectible big data provides the opportunity for government toRead… Read more »