{"id":13417,"date":"2019-12-30T14:00:26","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T14:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/12\/30\/data-front-and-center-at-the-nsf-in-2020\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T04:30:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T04:30:06","slug":"data-front-and-center-at-the-nsf-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/management\/leadership\/2019\/12\/30\/data-front-and-center-at-the-nsf-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Data front and center at the NSF in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The 2020 calendar year is all about data for National Science Foundation Chief Information Officer Dorothy Aronson, both within her own agency and in her work on the federal CIO council.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next year, Aronson said she is \u201chighly motivated\u201d to increase data literacy throughout NSF and get employees all talking in the same language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIT people have a certain set of words that we use that we understand,\u201d said Aronson, who is also the chief data officer at NSF. \u201cData people also have their own lingo \u2026 and then finally there are mission people who have their own way of talking. I think we\u2019re all working toward the same objectives. However, we don\u2019t understand each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aronson, who co-leads the workforce committee on the federal CIO council with Education CIO Jason Gray, wants to create clear career paths for data scientists. The government is currently grappling with how to cultivate its data for evidence-based policy making, which means that the federal government needs to attract more employees experienced with data \u2014 or retrain current employees. Not having established career paths for data scientists is an \u201cemerging problem,\u201d Aronson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause right now, there are a lot of data scientists who are federal employees, but they don\u2019t have the title data scientists, they might be a microbiologist, or they might be an IT person,\u201d Aronson said. \u201cBut for us to attract the right skill set the federal government, we need to be able to offer people the right terminology around their jobs. And so having the data science career path is an important step.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t