Government agencies support many disparate data stores and systems. To unlock the value in this data, achieve operational excellence, and meet strategic goals, there must be an ecosystem that not only meets data privacy and information security goals, but also supports an architecture that enables data-driven decision making. 

The Foundation for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (“Evidence Act”), requires collecting, analyzing, and using statistical methods to support policy making. To accomplish this there must be a data infrastructure architecture, that supports a comprehensive inventory for data management and data privacy, in addition to an Open Data Plan for appropriate data sharing. 

A Unified Data Infrastructure Architecture 

A modern data infrastructure should support the capacity for an agency’s statistics, research, and analysis efforts and enable users to make better decisions using data. To acquire value from data, mitigate costs and risks, agencies must not only support this modern data architecture, but also identify and connect the right data insights and algorithms. They must also engage the right service partner to advise and implement a sustainable solution that is anchored in purpose. This will position agencies to continue to recognize data as the enabler of their strategic goals. Figure 1 is an example of a unified data infrastructure architecture that WhirlWind Technologies asserts will sustain the ability for credible evidence building. 

WhirlWind Technologies Enables Data-driven Decision Making 

WhirlWind Technologies is a management and technology consulting firm with a long history of successful engagement in the federal government. Our Enterprise Program Management Office has achieved the world’s most recognized quality management system standard, ISO 9001:2015, and uses this framework to ensure the highest quality in the delivery of services. In addition, we employ Gartner’s best practices for data management and governance. Our data architects and scientists are skilled in on-premise and edge computing and are poised to take a holistic approach to your agency’s environment to ensure optimized data management for critical decisions and strategies. 

The US Census Bureau partnered with WhirlWind to address data architecture and data management challenges with enterprise efforts like DICE (Data Ingest and Collection for the Enterprise) and EDL (Enterprise Data Lake), within the Economic Reimbursable Surveys Division. The approach executed by the WhirlWind team emphasizes the deep expertise this skilled team employs: 

• Assessment of data systems and architecture
• Data ingest and transformation system
• Support of new data lake
• Data quality analyses for real time analytics
• Meta data management
• Dashboards for output