The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has begun to demo a new single-platform dashboard that will help Federal agencies use data to make better workforce planning decisions.
The new platform will improve collection, utilization, and accessibility of critical human capital management data to drive insightful decision-making across government, said an OPM official during a virtual webinar hosted by FCW on August 11.
OPM is preparing to deploy the new platform in phases within the next three to five months. According to Jason Barke, acting principal deputy associate director for OPM’s Employee Services, OPM staff is currently loading the platform and running usability and security testing to ensure data is sharable.
“We’ve always wanted to provide that drill-down data for agencies [and] to be a one-stop shop where they can come in and look at the data, and they can make decisions,” said Barke.
OPM will provide limited access to the data for agencies before making data publicly available, and that will require two-factor authentication to access. But the publicly available data will not be as complete as the internal government-use data.
Burke also provided a brief overview of a new data literacy project at OPM designed to identify and help improve skills gaps in the data analytics workforce.
“We wanted to understand better who was doing data analytics, who was doing evaluations and research to be able to determine where those skills and those competency gaps were, because we didn’t know,” said Barke. “This will allow us to get an inventory of some of the skills within OPM. So we may have other subject matter experts out there that we don’t know, and this would allow us to identify those people.”
Additionally, OPM’s new data literacy project will allow the agency to develop a skill and competency model working with small and medium-sized enterprises, identify and implement training strategies, and develop a dual rater assessment tool to gather supervisory reviews.
