Abstract:

Meeting the vision of the Evidence Act and the Federal Data Strategy will require Agencies to considerably expand the ways in which they leverage data to inform planning, policymaking and program administration. A big part of success in this challenge will be properly navigating the rapidly evolving landscape for analytical software. Considerable innovations, particularly in open source analytical software, provide immediate and transformative opportunities for Federal programs to expand and complement their existing analytical capabilities.

However, integration of these tools into the Federal IT environment and context often produces considerable challenges. Features and characteristics that make this software so transformative, can also create issues that may limit the utility of these tools, and set ceilings on the extent to which we can achieve the intended transformations in Federal analytics. This presentation will explore implicit and explicit choices associated in how this software is used and deployed, consequential implications that arise from those choices, and how these may influence the extent to which we succeed in building the desired capabilities and eliciting organizational change. The presentation presents some promising approaches and concludes with some suggestions for building organizational capacity to better leverage these tools.