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OPM.gov / Data / Data Strategy / Goal 4: Develop and implement strong data governance
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Goal 4: Develop and implement strong data governance

Develop and implement strong data governance to include privacy, security, and management.

OPM’s Data Governance Board is cultivating an enterprise approach and mindset for proper oversight and usage of OPM’s data assets. Going forward, the board seeks to strengthen data governance and management processes to maximize insights for decision-making while also ensuring security, high quality and proper use of human capital data, as well as respecting privacy through adherence to the Federal government’s framework of fair information practice principles.

OPM will establish additional data governance and stewardship roles and responsibilities for cataloging OPM’s data assets, managing appropriate access to data, and improving data quality and timeliness.

Business Data Stewards: OPM will establish the Business Data Steward role, a critical role in maturing data assets and guiding their use. Business Data Stewards are OPM programs’ trusted representatives who understand the data within appropriate business context. They define business terms, rules, and acceptable quality standards. They coordinate across the organization, including with Privacy Act system managers, and other agencies to research data issues and bring them to resolution. They define access requirements to OPM’s data assets and ensure that policies are followed.

OPM will promote an enterprise mindset to implementing data standards and reducing data collection duplication and agency burden, as practicable and appropriate. By doing so, OPM achieves improved interoperability with data providers and better data quality while also eliminating duplicative data collection efforts. OPM will streamline data collection and prioritize automated data quality processes to handle errors in incoming data efficiently and effectively. OPM strives to eliminate errors by conducting regular data audits with providers to catch and remediate issues at source.

A key tenet of OPM’s data strategy is the need to provide panoramic views across the Federal employee lifecycle to inform workforce planning and improve the employee experience. OPM will operationalize this by enabling traceability across the employee life cycle through a Federal employee master record. The Employee master record will have a tremendous impact as it connects employee records from multiple systems, bringing the 360 view to life and enabling new insights for evidence-based decision-making.

Data security and privacy are of utmost importance as OPM makes strides towards a more data-driven future. OPM will continue to strengthen cybersecurity protection by implementing Zero Trust principles across systems and incorporating Federal privacy law and policy, and the fair information practice principles embodied therein in all its data practices. OPM will take a risk-based approach to guide appropriate practices for collecting, maintaining, using, and disseminating human capital data at each level.

Consistent with Federal laws, OPM will increase data sharing with customers, partners, and the public in a secure manner and in keeping with Federal privacy requirements embodied in fair information practice principles to build data analysis capacity and deliver increased insights to policy- and decision-makers.
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