The Federal Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building is working to introduce the Federal Data Service to enhance how agencies link, access and safeguard data and is looking at dashboard projects of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to enable the proposed service to help agencies accelerate data maturity, FedScoop reported Monday.
“It was a real big culture change,” Ted Kaouk, chief data officer at USDA, said Friday during a meeting of the 25-member advisory panel. “It was about making visible some of the data quality issues.” Kaouk said his department made a “modest” investment of $2 million to begin implementing the dashboard projects across 19 agencies.
“Largely it was about consolidating resources we already had,” Kaouk said. “We had Tableau servers across multiple mission areas, and we were able to bring them into a common platform and I think in many cases actually save money as agencies were looking to move their own cloud platforms.”
He noted that working with the data and analytics center of excellence and four other COEs of the General Services Administration (GSA) helped USDA, which developed over 500 dashboards across 29 agencies, advance data maturity assessments and speed up dashboarding work.
