THE OFFICE OF PEOPLE ANALYTICS 2017 INITIATIVE

Force of the Future Initiative On his first day in office, Secretary Carter announced his goal to build the Force of the Future in order for the DoD to: Maintain a competitive edge in bringing in top talent to serve the nation Conduct a comprehensive review of DoD’s personnel systems The review focused on ways in which the DoD could: Increase sharing of personnel and ideas between the public and private sector Improve recruiting results and outcomes for the DoD Emphasize talent management and retention to ensure that the quality of today’s current force would translate to a “Force of the Future” One of the “Force of the Future” actions was establishing the Office of People Analytics

Background Why was OPA established? Use data analytics to better understand key components of servicemembers’ career paths Use analytics to better understand how policy or environmental changes affect the performance and composition of DoD workforce Take advantage of cutting edge analytic methods used in the private sector to understand and improve the DoD workforce Four main segments of DMDC were folded into OPA’s charter: Marketing research and outreach Cognitive and non-cognitive testing Personnel surveys and related research Personnel security research

Defining Characteristics Interdisciplinary Draw from expertise across statistics, quantitative social science, and information technology Cross-service Lead efforts that have joint service benefit Facilitate collaboration between services Advanced methods and analysis Apply subject matter expertise in data capture, management, and analysis to complex human resource challenges

Challenges Sharing Data How do we effectively protect privacy but share data to promote research? Disclosure Review Board Person-Data Environment (PDE)

Cont’d Challenges Sharing Data Military Survey Data Presents Unique Challenges: Population is smaller - 2 million compared w/ 320 million Samples are large due to cheap data collection Military is close community – They know much about each other Sponsors request very specific and large sets of demographics (e.g., gender, race) and experiential data (e.g., number and location of deployments) Many military researchers are in Military Linking data (e.g., health, financial)

Cont’d Challenges Sharing Data Solutions: Public use datasets Accessing full datasets: Data use agreements Secure data access platforms (e.g., PDE) Synthetic data

Contact: Kristin Williams Kristin.H.Williams2.civ@mail.mil David McGrath David.E.McGrath.civ@mail.mil