Weekly Roundup, April 11 - 15, 2016

Chief Data Officers.  Route 50 reports that the Ash Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government announced the formation of the Civic Analytics Network.  This network will be comprise of city-level Chief Data Officers and will “collaborate on shared projects that advance the use of data visualization and predictive analytics in solving important urban problems related to economic opportunity, poverty reduction, and addressing the root causes of social problems,” according to the Ash Center.

Shared Services.  Federal News Radio reports that in the 9 months since the Office of Management and Budget mandated agencies to move to an electronic invoicing system by 2018, 13 of the 24 CFO Act agencies “plan on moving or have moved to the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s Invoice Processing Platform (IPP).”

New Hope.  Patrick Lester writes in Government Executive: “The new Evidence-based Policymaking Commission, established by legislation signed by President Obama on March 30, is charged with identifying ways to increase the use of such information. Its most important task, however, may not be coming up with new ideas, but providing a bipartisan imprimatur for ideas that already exist.”

Tracking Top Talent.  Government Executive reports that Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, said at a congressional roundtable: “One of the interesting phenomena [in government] is that we do have a performance management system for the career workforce, not for those 4,000 politicals,”  . . .. “As an example, Stier referred to a provision in draft legislation under consideration by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee that would require annual performance plans for VA political appointees, similar to the reviews senior executives undergo. “Why shouldn’t that be across all of government?” Stier asked.”

UK’s “Better Buy.” David Shields, a former agency head in the UK government, writesin Federal Computer Week: “We began by identifying opportunities to aggregate and centrally coordinate procurement, much as Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Anne Rung and GSA's Federal Acquisition Service are doing to encourage the U.S. government to "buy as one" using category management. . . . At the heart of the U.K. effort was an analysis of spending, which we used to provide management information that would help us make the best operational decisions. We also used it to develop strategic plans in key spending categories for leveraging government demand and interacting more effectively with suppliers. The analytics provided the launching pad for a procurement transformation that saved millions of U.K. pounds and made those funds available to agencies for mission accomplishment.”

Employee Accountability. Jeff Neal, former federal chief human capital officer, writes for  Federal News Radio:  “I believe there are seven characteristics of any reform that are essential for accountability to be real and to avoid a spoils system.”

Data-Driven Frenimies.  Richard Greene and Katherine Barrett write in Governing:“Historically, there's been an unfortunate and unproductive divide between people who have the same goal of getting government to make more informed and data-driven decisions. On one side, there are those tasked with measuring performance. On the other are program evaluators.”  They then go on to describe the pros and cons of each approach.

Data Partnerships.  Route 50 republished a useful article that describes federal-state food safety data partnerships, centered around the operation of PulseNet, which is supported by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.

National Governors Association’s Data Labs.  The National Governor’s Association announced that six states—Arizona, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia—will participate in a learning lab on improving the use of data in policymaking: “Learning labs provide an opportunity for a limited number of state teams to visit a state that is successfully putting an innovative practice in place. This four-month opportunity from NGA will include a meeting in the state of Washington and help selected states develop effective practices that use data to address policy issues and build a culture of learning.”

John Lainhart

DHS: Open Source Software Is Like Giving Mafia a Copy of FBI System Code.  The Department of Homeland Security is strongly advising against a proposed policy that would force agencies to make 20 percent of their software code public. DHS has suggested striking significant passages from the draft. Supporters of that policy think it could cut government spending by allowing agencies to share custom-developed code instead of getting third parties to redevelop it, and allow outside developers to spot-check it for security flaws.  DHS is concerned that “baring too much source code will increase the government’s vulnerability to hacking." Publishing source code could also let attackers “construct highly targeted attacks against the software,” or “build-in malware directly into the source code, compile, then replace key software components as 'doppelgangers' of the original,” DHS’ Office of the Chief Information Officer argued.

Own Worst Enemy: Two-Thirds of Government Data Breaches are Accidental Leaks.  Public sector data breaches exposed some 28 million identities in 2015, but hackers were responsible for only one-third of those compromises, according to new research. Instead, negligence was behind nearly two-thirds of the exposed identities through government agencies, the Symantec 2016 Internet Security Threat Report concluded. In total, the report suggests 21 million identities were compromised accidentally, compared to 6 million by hackers. In other words, officials at the local, state and federal government levels were sometimes the public’s own worst enemy when it came to data breaches in 2015. But they were hardly alone in the worst year yet for global data breaches. According to Symantec, more than half a billion personal records were stolen, lost or compromised in 2015, including 191 million records from a single incident: a U.S. voter database that mysteriously appeared online late in the year. As with many high-profile data breaches, the fallout may take years to assess.

Official: DHS Looking to Silicon Valley for Help on Internet of Things Security.  The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to connect with Silicon Valley startups could help it protect the Internet of Things, an official said Wednesday. “Right now, the Internet of Things is taking off," Reginald Brothers, DHS’ undersecretary for Science and Technology, said during a Senate hearing on the agency's budget. "We don’t want to be left behind, in terms of how we think about security. We’re aggressively pushing forward."  In DHS’ trips to Silicon Valley, where the department recently opened a new outpost, “We said, ‘what if we engage the folks who are actually doing the development work on the Internet of Things, and talk to them about security," Brothers testified. "What are their concerns?” Conversations with industry working groups surfaced a handful of concerns, including secure ways to detect new connections and authenticating components to determine if they’re legitimate. DHS is working with the tech sector to understand “the role we should play here,” Brothers said.

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 The Business of Government Radio Show.  What is the Federal Invest in What Works Index? What can be done to better integrate evidence and rigorous evaluation in decision-making? How can federal agencies increase and enhance their evaluation capacity? Join host Michael J. Keegan as he explores these questions and so much more with John Bridgeland and Bruce Reed, Senior Fellows at Results for America.

 Broadcast Schedule: The show airs Monday at 11 a.m., and Friday at 1 p.m. on Federal News Radio 1500AM WFED.

 If you can't wait, though, you can listen to (or download) this week's program and all our previous interviews at businessofgovernment.org.