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The Latest From The Commerce Blog

Lessons Learned: Exploring the Value of Open Data on Capitol Hill

Submitted on September 19, 2014 - 10:47am
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Lessons Learned: Exploring the Value of Open Data on Capitol Hill

Cross blog post by Mark Doms, Under Secretary for Economic Affairs

Government data helps drive our economy and will increasingly become more important in the future. Thursday, I had the opportunity to speak on this topic at a congressional briefing hosted by U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Chairman of the Budget Committee’s Government Performance Task Force, and the Center for Data Innovation. Panelists included Daniel Castro, Director of the Center for Data Innovation, Kathleen Phillips, COO for Zillow, Tom Schenk, Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago, and Steven Adler, IBM’s Chief Information Strategist.

We explored how government data is the foundation of the ongoing data revolution, fostering innovation, creating jobs and driving better decision-making in both the private and public sectors. The federal government is, and will continue to be, the only provider of credible, comprehensive, and consistent data on our people, economy, and climate. We also pointed to the findings in our recently released report,“Fostering Innovation, Creating Jobs, Driving Better Decisions: The Value of Government Data,” which found that billions in economic output and trillions in resource decisions are driven by federal data.

Daniel Castro, Director of the Center for Data Innovation, urged attendees to make sure Congress continues to invest in our data infrastructure. He highlighted the value of open data, ensuring that data flows more seamlessly between the public and private sectors. Castro also focused on the need to consider new ways to enable cooperation between government and industry to maximize the benefits of big data to the greatest number in society.

Zillow’s Chief Operating Officer Kathleen Phillips discussed how her company uses a wide variety of federal and local data to better connect buyers and sellers in the real estate marketplace. Zillow provides critical information in an easy to digest mapping format for over 50 million properties around the country. Their Zillow Home Value Forecast, fed in part by federal datasets, also predicts local home values. Zillow uses data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and other federal sources to provide a real time evaluation of local real estate markets.

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Deputy Secretary Andrews Lauds Software Industry for Helping Ensure America is Open for Business

Submitted on September 17, 2014 - 4:55pm
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Deputy Secretary Andrews Lauds Software Industry for Helping Ensure America is Open for Business

Today, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Bruce Andrews spoke about the software industry’s role in strengthening the economy at an event hosted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry. During the event, titled “The Software Century: Analyzing Economic Impact & Job Creation,” Deputy Secretary Andrews talked with SIIA Vice President of Public Policy Mark MacCarthy about the Commerce Department’s efforts to support American businesses in the software and other high-tech sectors.

During the discussion, Deputy Secretary Andrews highlighted how the Department supports the software industry at practically every stage of development through our “Open for Business Agenda.” Those efforts include increasing broadband access across the country, linking small businesses and their customers with high-speed Internet, boosting manufacturing to provide the hardware software needs, and strengthening U.S. intellectual property protections, cybersecurity and consumer privacy.

Deputy Secretary Andrews also talked about data as a key department-wide strategic priority. Commerce is working to unleash more of its data to strengthen the nation’s economic growth; make its data easier to access, understand, and use; and, maximize the return of data investments for industries, including the software industry.

It was fitting, then, that SIIA today released a first-of-its-kind report providing detailed analysis and data related to the software industry’s output, productivity, exports and job creation. MacCarthy, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert J. Shapiro, and representatives from Oracle, Intuit and GM discussed the report, titled “The Impact of the U.S Software Industry on the American Economy,” at the event.

The report epitomizes how government data is essential for industries to understand their contributions to the broader economy and how improvements can be made accordingly. Further, Deputy Secretary Andrews explained that the prevalence of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis data throughout the report is a testament to the usefulness of the department’s data to help American businesses grow. The value of government data was recently highlighted in “Fostering Innovation, Creating Jobs, Driving Better Decisions: The Value of Government Data,” a Commerce report by the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA).

Secretary Pritzker Says Increased Gender Diversity in Corporate Boardrooms is Vital to Economic Success

Submitted on September 17, 2014 - 10:40am
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Secretary Pritzker Says Increased Gender Diversity in Corporate Boardrooms is Vital to Economic Success

Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker addressed the urgent need to boost our companies’ economic competitiveness by bringing more women into corporate leadership at the Global Conference on Women in the Boardroom, hosted by the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). 

Pritzker noted that this pressing challenge of addressing the of a lack of women in corporate leadership is nothing new in American business. Female advancement in corporate America is stagnant. Women hold less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. Women hold less than 17 percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. And 10 percent of these companies have no women on their boards at all. 

Women in corporate leadership roles is not solely a women’s issue. Secretary Pritzker argued that it is an issue of economic competitiveness and the presence of more women in the boardroom is critical to companies’ creativity, performance, and ability to thrive in the 21st century. Leadership with diverse and different backgrounds typically mean more creativity, fresh ideas, and better outcomes. 

To increase the number of women in the boardroom, Secretary Pritzker recommended five steps to integrate gender diversity into corporate DNA:

  1. Engage men in senior leadership to look outside their known circle of colleagues.
  2. Develop deliberate strategies for recruitment, including establishing a rule that a board’s nominating committee must consider at least one woman per opening.
  3. Review the impact of internal policies on female employees, including sick, family, medical, and maternity leave, then change then where appropriate.
  4. Ensure equal opportunities for mentoring and professional development.
  5. Measure and disclose company’s diversity statistics and couple that with action. 

Secretary Pritzker committed herself to highlighting the issue of women in the boardroom, tout solutions, and advance diversity. She promised to continue to call on leaders to act – in government and in business and she will highlight companies that set the example, recruit more women to join their boards, and take action to improve their reputations and their bottom line. 

Secretary Pritzker concluded, “When women have a voice in corporate leadership, American companies thrive and the American economy prospers. When women have a seat in the boardroom, American business succeeds.”