b'Insightsagendas focused on first asking the big questions, and then getting the information needed to answer those questions. What kinds of questions might agencies have? The Act envisions that agencies will begin to understand the longer-term societal outcomes of their programs, be able to visualize the results of multiple federal programs in various geographic areas, improve their operations, and better serve the public. How are these learning agencies created and carried out?Agencies are required to designate a chief evaluation officer, a senior statistical official, and a chief data officer. The qualifications, data governance requirements, andof artificial intelligence and machine learning. Agencies are general expectations around these activities are laid out indrowning in old unstructured data some of it handwritten in the OMB guidance memorandum to agencies, M-19-23. InPDF form. Technology like machine learning can help. You September, OMB held an orientation for people in these newcan do things like text analysis with machine learning. roles to help them understand their responsibilities. WeAdvances in technology takes us away from more manual found the orientations to be very interesting because of theprocesses to more automated processes. It seems to me a wide range of backgrounds, skills, and agency missionnatural next step for the statistical and data communities is to objectives across government, which highlighted thestart relying on such technologies as artificial intelligence and challenges we are facing. The good news is that althoughthe machine learning. We just need to ensure we address this is a heavy lift for many agencies, and a major cultureissues of transparency and bias in order to assure that we change, there is a lot of enthusiasm, commitment, andcontinue to provide high quality data that can be relied upon pockets of deep knowledge that people are eager to share. to guide important decisions. We have also established an OMB Data Policy Council to further this effort. We have been working towards meetingTo learn more about the Office of Management and Budget,some statutory deadlines we have in the Evidence Actgo to omb.gov.for releasing Notices of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) for public comment. The first one we hope to releaseTo hear the interviews from The Business of Government Hour, go to defines the roles and responsibilities of statistical agencies,businessofgovernment.org/interviews.emphasizing their need to be able to produce objective, unbiased, relevant, timely high-quality data without politicalTo download the show as a podcast, go to PodcastOne or iTunes and interference. The second sets out criteria on how units withinsearch for The Business of Government Hour.agencies, such as evaluation offices, can qualify to get the official designation of a statistical unit. This designationTo view excerpts of the show, go to youtube.com/businessofgovernment.comes with many advantages, such as access to confidential data for statistical purposes. These changes are quite significant, and the Act envisions that they will occur with some standardization across the federal government. We have a first-year implementation plan, which should be out by the end of this year, and has very specific things that we want agencies to do. What does the future hold in the federal data andstatistical communities? There are tremendous opportunities for agencies to take advantage of now, with an eye on the future. Theres the rise WINTER 2019 / 2020 IBM Center for The Business of Government 43'