Data Governance: Agencies Made Progress in Establishing Governance, but Need to Address Key Milestones
Fast Facts
How do agencies ensure that their data is transparent, accessible, and of sufficient quality for policy-making and informing the public?
Federal laws and guidance have outlined several actions agencies can take to implement "data governance"—a framework of organizational structures and supports intended to help agencies improve the quality and availability of data.
The four agencies we reviewed made progress establishing data governance. We made recommendations to ensure agencies address key milestones for data governance by assessing data and infrastructure maturity, staff data literacy, and more.
Highlights
What GAO Found
The Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Commerce (Commerce), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have recently taken steps to establish data governance consistent with applicable statute and guidance. The selected agencies established data governance frameworks to help ensure that their data assets are transparent, accessible, and of sufficient quality to support their agencies' missions, improve operations, and provide information to the public. All four agencies designated Chief Data Officers (CDO) as required under the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act of 2018 (OPEN Government Data Act). As directed in the Federal Data Strategy 2020 Action Plan (2020 Action Plan), USDA, Commerce, and NSF established data governance bodies and published information about them on their websites. USDA and NSF have also established agency-wide data strategies. However, Commerce and HUD have not conducted an initial data maturity assessment, as required by September 20, 2020. All four agencies identified opportunities to increase staff data skills but three agencies did not perform an assessment of staff data literacy skills by July 31, 2020, as directed in the 2020 Action Plan.
USDA, Commerce, HUD, and NSF developed data quality plans for their spending data reported under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) that were largely consistent with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance. However, Commerce and HUD did not include plans to ensure that information on award descriptions—defined as a description of the purpose of the award—is reported in plain English as required. Without plain English descriptions, the public and other users of the data may not clearly understand the purpose of the award.
The OPEN Government Data Act also established a CDO Council to identify government-wide best practices for the use, dissemination, and generation of data. The Council adopted its charter in June 2020. The Council supports agency CDOs' implementation of data governance and provides a forum for cross-agency collaboration to address issues of national importance. The CDO Council could better realize these benefits by developing additional mechanisms to track progress toward established goals.
In addition to these requirements, the OPEN Government Data Act assigns the responsibility for implementing data governance to agency CDOs. Officials from academia, state and local governments, and industry told us that effectively implementing data governance requires a culture change that results in a shared understanding of the importance of using data as a strategic asset. Based on interviews with these officials and analysis of related documentation, GAO identified three key questions for federal CDOs to consider to effectively implement data governance:
1. How can the CDO ensure data governance strategies answer the agency's priority mission questions?
2. What are the CDO's key objectives with regard to data governance?
3. How can the CDO communicate the value of data governance?
Why GAO Did This Study
Federal decision makers need data of sufficient quality to assess whether federal programs achieve intended results. Effective data governance is a key component to ensure data quality.
Congress included provisions in statute for GAO to report on the quality of spending data and use of evidence. This report examines: (1) selected agencies' efforts to meet the data governance milestones in the 2020 Action Plan; (2) the extent to which agency data quality plans for spending data were consistent with OMB guidance; (3) the extent to which the CDO Council follows leading collaboration practices; and (4) key questions to help CDOs effectively implement data governance. To address these objectives, GAO selected four agencies to represent a range of data governance experiences: (1) USDA, (2) Commerce, (3) HUD, and (4) NSF. GAO reviewed documents and interviewed officials regarding agencies' implementation of data governance. GAO also interviewed state and local CDOs and officials from academia and industry.
Recommendations
GAO is making a total of nine recommendations to the four selected agencies to address milestones in the 2020 Action Plan and to ensure their data quality plans are consistent with OMB guidance. GAO is also making one recommendation to the CDO Council to develop additional mechanisms for monitoring progress toward established goals. The four selected agencies generally agreed with GAO's recommendations. The CDO Council did not agree or disagree with the recommendation.
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Agriculture | The Secretary of the Department of Agriculture should direct the Chief Data Officer to perform an assessment of current staff data literacy and data skills, conduct a gap analysis between the current staff's skills and the skills the agency requires, and establish a baseline performance plan to close the identified data skills and literacy gaps. (Recommendation 1) |
USDA generally agreed with our recommendation. In October 2021, USDA officials identified four priority competency gaps as a result of a gap analysis, which was completed in July 2021: (1) Creating visualizations, (2) Data stewardship skills to ensure agency data are high quality, (3) Skills and knowledge of best practices to improve data accessibility, and (4) Programming languages such as R or Python. In December 2021,USDA provided GAO with a copy of their Data Skills Assessment Action Plan that identifies near-, mid-, and long-term activities the agency will pursue to close identified data skills and literacy gaps. These steps should help ensure that USDA's federal workforce is well-prepared to support evidence-building activities.
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| Department of Commerce | The Secretary of the Department of Commerce should direct the Chief Data Officer to aggregate bureau-level assessments to conduct and document the outcome of an initial data maturity assessment. (Recommendation 2) |
Commerce agreed with our recommendation. Commerce combined its data maturity assessment and its staff data literacy and data skills assessment into one assessment managed by Commerce's Maturity Assessment and Data Skills Working Group convened under the Commerce Data Governance Board with representatives from all 12 Commerce bureaus. In January 2021, Commerce provided us with its aggregated bureau-level data maturity and data skills assessment, which sets a baseline for future improvements.
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| Department of Commerce | The Secretary of the Department of Commerce should direct the Chief Data Officer to aggregate bureau-level assessments and analyses to assess current staff data literacy and data skills and to conduct a gap analysis between the current staff's skills and the skills the agency requires, and establish a baseline performance plan to close the identified data skills and literacy gaps. (Recommendation 3) |
Commerce agreed with our recommendation. Commerce combined its data maturity assessment and its staff data literacy and data skills assessment into one assessment managed by Commerce's Maturity Assessment and Data Skills Working Group convened under the Commerce Data Governance Board with representatives from all 12 Commerce bureaus. In February 2021, Commerce provided us with its aggregated bureau-level data maturity and data skills assessment, which sets a baseline for future improvements.
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| Department of Commerce | The Secretary of the Department of Commerce should direct the Chief Financial Officer to develop and include a description of the controls for the Award Description data element, specifically the agency's significant milestones and major decisions pertaining to the use of plain English descriptions for describing the purpose of its awards, in the next data quality plan update. (Recommendation 4) |
Commerce agreed with our recommendation and in December 2021 provided us with its updated data quality plan and related internal guidance on requirements for certifying financial assistance data. The guidance includes a description of the controls for reporting award descriptions in plain English and is consistent with the government-wide data standard, which will help improve the transparency of reported financial assistance awards.
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| Department of Housing and Urban Development | The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development should direct the Chief Data Officer to publish all data governance materials on its web page, including the data governance body membership, charter, and the cadence of its meetings. (Recommendation 5) |
HUD generally agreed with our recommendation. In October 2022, HUD published the membership of its data governance board and the board's charter, including the cadence of its meetings. These materials are available on HUD's website. These steps will help ensure the data governance board functions as a forum for key leaders and stakeholders to collaborate and implement the agency's data governance activities.
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| Department of Housing and Urban Development | The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development should direct the Chief Data Officer to select an operational maturity assessment model for data and data-related infrastructure and conduct and document the outcome of an initial data maturity assessment. (Recommendation 6) |
HUD generally agreed with our recommendation. In February 2023, the Office of the Chief Data Officer (OCDO) selected an enterprise data maturity assessment model. HUD published its corresponding Data Maturity Assessment Report with the outcome of its initial assessment in September 2023. This assessment sets a baseline for future improvements in data governance.
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| Department of Housing and Urban Development | The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development should direct the Chief Data Officer to assess current staff data literacy and data skills, conduct a gap analysis between the current staff's skills and the skills the agency requires, and establish a baseline performance plan to close the identified data skills and literacy gaps. (Recommendation 7) |
HUD generally agreed with our recommendation. In September 2023, HUD published its Data Maturity Assessment Report, which included an assessment of staff data skills. The report states that to move the agency to the next maturity level in data management, the appropriate data skills are the centerpiece to support HUD's different mission-critical activities. In August 2024, HUD officials said the Office of the Chief Data Officer is developing an additional 'data literacy program' to address staff skill needs. Part of this program is an assessment of skills gap to focus the training needs. We will continue to monitor HUD's efforts to assess staff data literacy and skills and to conduct a related gap analysis.
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| Department of Housing and Urban Development | The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development should direct the Chief Financial Officer to develop and include a description of the controls for the Award Description data element—specifically the agency's significant milestones and major decisions pertaining to the use of plain English descriptions for describing the purpose of its awards—in the next data quality plan update. (Recommendation 8) |
HUD generally agreed with our recommendation. In November 2023, HUD told us that the DATA Act Senior Accountable Official (SAO) is taking an iterative approach to develop and implement solutions that enable HUD to strengthen compliance with OMB's award description requirements. The initial phase of the Award Description Data Quality Improvement initiative was focused on Programs that received American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding. The DATA Act SAO defined three data collection processes for the Programs to submit the award description information in five discrete data fields, which aligns to the OMB prescribed award description data elements. These schemas are integrated with the existing HUD Financial Assistance Broker Submission (FABS) reporting process. Once collected, the award descriptions are reported to USASpending on a weekly basis. This data collection and reporting process went live in October 2022. In FY2023 and FY2024 the focus has been to expand the scope to non-loan financial assistance types and scale the data collection schema process HUD-wide. HUD is working with selected programs to adopt the data collection process appropriate for their business area. In addition, the DATA Act SAO has also implemented processes to monitor compliance with completeness and timeliness of reporting award descriptions and to evaluate the data quality of award descriptions. HUD plans to incorporate updates related to this finding into the Data Quality Approach and Plan (DQP) and will track this within the forthcoming DATA Act Data Quality Plan Implementation project plan (DQPI). We will continue to monitor HUD's efforts to update its data quality plan.
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| National Science Foundation | The Director of the National Science Foundation should direct the Chief Data Officer to conduct a gap analysis between the current staff's skills and the skills the agency requires, and establish a baseline performance plan to close the identified data skills and literacy gaps. (Recommendation 9) |
In its Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Request to Congress, NSF reported that it completed the skill gap analysis in December 2023. NSF reported its next step will be to establish a baseline performance plan to address skills gaps and recommend approaches for closure. We will continue to monitor NSF's develop of its performance plans.
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| Chief Data Officers Council | The CDO Council Chair, in coordination with the Council, should develop additional mechanisms, such as performance measures, to monitor and report on progress toward meeting its short- and long-term goals. (Recommendation 10) |
In March 2022, CDO Council officials provided documentation that the Council developed mechanisms to monitor and report on progress toward meeting its short and long-term goals. The Council developed objectives and performance measures for each goal. The Council's Executive Committee also regularly meets with CDO Council working groups to monitor deliverables and timeframes. These actions will help facilitate the Council success in meeting its goals.
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