1. THE OFFICE OF PEOPLE ANALYTICS
2017 INITIATIVE

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. 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)

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

8. Contact: Kristin Williams
David McGrath