Digital Strategy

21st Century IDEA

We are building a better customer experience for Federal agencies, industry, and the public through implementing the requirements laid out in the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (21st Century IDEA). We have already taken several steps to improve our websites and digital services, including:

1. Establishing a Digital Governance Steering Committee and agency-wide teams to coordinate with stakeholders and ensure consistency and support for our agency-wide modernization activities.
2. Identifying immediate and long-term actions to modernize our digital presence that combine IT solutions with workforce initiatives such as launching internal communities of practice and developing a cadre of trusted testers.

Learn more about our progress in Implementing 21st Century IDEA by reading our 2019 Annual Report [PDF - 213 KB].

Open Data and Schedule

GSA welcomes customer and stakeholder comments and feedback at opendata@gsa.gov or to our public Google group at GSA data.

Enterprise Data Inventory Process

The Enterprise Information and Data Management team (EIDM) within the GSA Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and the Data Management Working Group (DMWG), comprised of representatives from each Staff and Service Office (SSO), is proactively engaging the enterprise in an effort to identify datasets which can be made available to the public. We are encouraging the release of data assets, or subsets thereof, as a standard and best practice across the agency and its programs. Representatives from each Staff and Service Office (SSO) such as FAS, PBS, OGP and OCSIT, are coordinating with the SSO program staff and data owners to update datasets previously released on Data.gov or other public communication channels, and also identify additional datasets which are determined to have high value to the public. GSA will continually release agency data on its Open Datasets page as it is approved for release by the agency.

Milestone Schedule

GSA’s Inventory Schedule is provided in the table below and also a description of the agency plans for expanding, enriching and opening the inventory each quarter through November 30, at a minimum.

Milestone Date	Milestone Title/Description	Expand	Enrich	Open
February 28	Provide data from under-represented GSA Programs	Add/Update 10-12 datasets from Office of Governmentwide Policy (OGP) and other SSOs	Upgrade to Open Data Schema 1.1 and add new APIs to the EDI	Send new datasets through clearance process to determine which datasets can be made public
May 31, 2015	Provide data from under-represented Staff and Service Offices	Catalog data from under-represented Staff and Service Offices	Include data sets from under-represented Staff and Service Offices; This could be data associated with daily operations, End of year reporting, Budget or travel data	Publish release of newly available public datasets and APIs on social media outlets
August 31	Provide high priority/value data	Coordinate with portfolio managers of high value/priority data to add new datasets	Where appropriate, establish APIs for high priority/high value data	Where possible, add high priority/value datasets to GSA's mobile site
November 30	Provide data from GSA's performance reference model (Performance.gov)	Catalog datasets from GSA's performance reference model (Performance.gov)	Add extended metadata and cross references to GSA Performance goals	Include data used to support GSA performance goals in EDI

Customer Feedback Process

GSA welcomes customer and stakeholder comments and feedback at opendata@gsa.gov or to our public Google group at GSA data. In addition, each SSO and their program offices has outreach activities with their customers by means of social media, collaboration platforms, town halls, industry days, challenges, and via public facing webpages on gsa.gov. Each office works closely with our Office of Communications and Marketing to solicit feedback through the multiple communication channels and will consider all customer feedback in their proactive disclosure efforts. The internal clearance processes established at GSA provides the risk mitigation necessary before GSA releases the data assets to the public.

Background

Since Former President Obama announced a digital strategy initiative in May 2012, GSA has been working to build interoperability and openness securely into our systems. We are developing common standards and producing better content and data to be delivered through multiple channels in device-agnostic ways. Continually addressing privacy and security in the digital age, we are creating an environment where citizens are increasingly becoming partners in building a better government.

GSA has successfully met its digital-strategy milestones [PDF - 103 KB], remaining agile and flexible, and fundamentally shifting the way we are approaching digital government. The agency has also pioneered several government-wide solutions called for in the strategy that are helping all agencies implement this important initiative. For example, we provide a growing list of API data sets that anyone can use to unlock government data on the Developer Resources page.

We will provide continual updates as we implement the Open Data Policy—Managing Information as an Asset.