DoubleStar began its assessment activities the week of September 12, 2005. In the subsequent three weeks, DoubleStar conducted interviews with nearly 60 stakeholders in 12 agencies. These agencies provided their take on how the Datamart currently operates and gave recommendations on how it can add even more value to their operations. DoubleStar's research also included business and technology surveys provided in advance to key interviewees and assessment stakeholders, along with readings in various documents and a number of relevant Web sites.

The results of the assessment showed that the Datamart is well respected, well designed, and provides good customer service. It also revealed that the current reports within the Datamart are operational, transactional, and detail oriented. It is considered relatively difficult to use, and the current usage is limited to report writers, not key decision makers. DoubleStar provided several recommendations to help us improve. The NBC can enable wider usage and self-service by adopting a consolidated, high-impact, interactive presentation of workforce information. Security can be enhanced by implementing a security architecture that aligns more closely with client business needs. Expanding the scope of the NBC's information delivery by including additional subject areas and data elements requested by clients will enhance our value proposition. Workforce planning and strategic management of human capital can be enhanced by implementing a process to integrate client-stored strategic and tactical target values within the Datamart. Finally, agencies identified an interest in having the NBC provide a workforce analytics consulting and education service.

Again, the NBC is well positioned for each of these recommendations. The NBC already support agency-managed data in the Datamart, bringing in data from the National Aeronautics Space Administration, the Securities Exchange Commission, and the Department of Transportation. Development of the Human Resources Line of Business will present more opportunities to support data from additional sources. The infrastructure is already in place to support the integration of these sources. The NBC is currently analyzing options to improve our library of reports and to begin supporting more interactive, easier to use reports. Finally, our security model is being analyzed for options to enable easier access to statistical data about the workforce without violating the Privacy Act security sourced from the FPPS.

There is much work to be done, but the NBC is confident that, working with our FPPS community, we can build an easy-to-use business intelligence environment that will support the information needed to enable the agencies to make well-informed business decisions. This improved Datamart will support human capital strategic management decisions based on business best practices, identify the information needed to support these decisions, and provide an easy-to-use tool to help make these decisions.