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 »
After millennia, now most people are drawn to “GPS,” or “Google Maps,” and rely on navigation to drive, to hike, to find a restaurant, to catch fish, and more. Such interest and dependence on geospatial information systems’ data creates a neologism of “a Google Map” or a “GPS Map,” but neither are maps as weRead… Read more »
Capturing the value of ‘Big Data’ has emerged through the alliterative measures of “v.’ The growth of “v’s” usually has applied to “Big Data” but applies to all data. As in cosmology, questions arise how big “Big Data” is and can there be a limit to how much it can expand. So far, the gravityRead… Read more »
The world is awash with new health technologies – Fit Bits, iPhone apps, nutrition trackers, heart rate monitors. Even healthcare, one of the most slow-moving, risk-averse sectors, is starting to see the potential of using data to improve outcomes. The government has begun to understand the advantages to digitizing health records, and to implement programsRead… Read more »