General Services Administration (GSA) officials underscored the importance of ethics, literacy, and culture in the government data science sector at an August 30 event hosted by GovLoop.

Trey Bradley, GSA’s Program Director for Strategic Data Initiatives and Office of Shared Solutions and Performance Improvement, was one of the key players in the development of the Federal Data Ethics Framework (now owned by the Federal Chief Data Officer Council). was.

“The Federal Ethics Data Framework was developed with everyone in mind,” he said. “The goal of the Data Ethics Framework was to bring together a lot of the best thinking about data ethics and create a framework that people can easily understand.”

Bradley spoke of his experience training officials at federal agencies using the new ethics framework and reiterated the need for data literacy training.

Bradley frequently works with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and has identified e-invoicing and recruitment as effective use cases for data science performed within these federal agencies. I mentioned two surveys.

“We were able to show that automated billing leads to cost savings…reducing costs for agencies and ultimately saving taxpayers money,” he said.

He went on to say that federal employment “could be tricky.” Bradley said it’s important to collect data on how federal recruiters are retaining employees to better understand which key occupations need to be filled. I’m here.

Finally, we discussed the importance of creating a culture within the federal government where data literacy is part of the norm.

“You need to be able to work across agencies and silos,” says Bradley.

“We need to make sure we are sharing data within agencies, which can be difficult for the federal government, and in some cases even more difficult than sharing across agencies,” Bradley said. says Mr. He said that good data sharing supports a culture in which data science is better known and used on a daily basis.