The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is working on a data literacy credential program that will accompany its circular announced earlier this year, a top OMB official said on Wednesday.
Speaking at an ACT-IAC event, Kristen Wilson, the strategic acquisition data management lead at OMB, said that the credential’s curriculum outline will be developed within the next two years alongside the office’s High-Definition (HiDef) centralized data management policy framework established by the circular released in May.
The program will cover the “full data lifecycle” in the acquisition domain and will help bring “data skills” to “back-office functions.”
“That’s the plan right to get out to not only our contracting officers, but everyone who touches acquisition data to understand the importance of data quality at the time of entry, to understand how data is used throughout the acquisition life cycle,” said Wilson.
The training provided in the program will also include tools and analytics capabilities related to the HiDef data environment.
“We expect that once the HiDef environment is built, and the agencies start getting access to this data, we anticipate that there will be more products that come out of the hi def environment that’s using all of this Federal acquisition data,” explained Wilson on existing and future data tools that the program will provide training on.
“You could absolutely see a future state where we are building generative AI capabilities to help the workforce build out statements of work, or RFIs, et cetera,” she continued.
The program joins other workforce data training initiatives across Federal offices and agencies. Additional panelists from the General Services Administration (GSA) and Department of Transportation discussed their programs including GSA’s AI and Data Analytics Centers of Excellence which provide the Federal workforce leadership, acquisition, and technical training to understand how AI works.
Introduced earlier this summer, the Procurement Copilot Tool is another initiative to train the Federal acquisition workforce, providing access to standardized, non-configurable commodity pricing data to help officials quickly access market research data.
