In 2022, the State Department updated its criteria for evaluating U.S. Foreign Service employees’ performance to reflect data’s growing usefulness — in all aspects of department work.
The Core Precepts outline five competencies that selection boards consider when reviewing employees and making decisions about tenure or promotions. As part of the “substantive and technical expertise” competency, Foreign Service employees must develop “the ability to read, understand, create, and communicate data as information” and to identify “the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches based on data-driven analysis, as appropriate.”
In introducing the change, Lisa Vickers, then-Director of the Office of Performance Evaluation in the Global Talent Management Bureau, wrote, “The way we do work has changed; today our employees need to make data-driven decisions and policies, so they need to know how to interpret data.” The change came shortly after State released its enterprise data strategy, titled “Empowering Data-Informed Policy.”
In it, State officials said the department would take a mission-driven approach to implementing the strategy, focusing on key mission areas, such as global operations, cybersecurity and multilateralism. For example, in the area of multilateralism, the Bureau of International Organization Affairs has created dashboards to give State employees insights into the diplomatic landscape, according to the June 2024 issue of the Foreign Service Journal.
“Data on how a particular country voted on U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolutions over time may help inform our decision to support a future resolution sponsored by that country,” writes Paula Osborn, the department’s Deputy Chief Data and AI Officer.
For example, its Bureau of Global Public Affairs now uses an AI-based program called Northstar to continuously assess the department’s social media footprint.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed Northstar as part of a presentation at a June 2024 event, where he talked about AI with Chief Data and AI Officer Matthew Graviss.
The tool “is able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world, to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over 100 languages and then immediately translate, synthesize, and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space immediately,” Blinken said.
While acknowledging AI can be disruptive, Blinken sees it “as a way to strengthen what we’re doing, to strengthen our diplomacy, to better serve our country, to better serve our people, to better advance our interests in what is an increasingly complex world.”
This article appeared in our guide, “Leveling Up With Data.” To learn more about how agencies are making data work for them, download it here:
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