Justin Antonipillai

The National Technical Information Service has just posted a Federal Register Notice inviting proposals from for-profit, non-profit, or research organizations to enter into Joint Venture Partnership agreements with NTIS to develop and deliver innovative, agile data solutions within the Department of Commerce or around the federal government. We’re looking for companies and organizations—selected through a merit-based process—that will partner with NTIS to assist Federal agencies in developing and implementing innovative ways to collect, connect, access, analyze, or use Federal data and data services. To illustrate, the Joint Ventures could help provide:
New technical capability or private sets to help statistical agencies derive economic, demographic and social insights from Federal and private sector data;
Assistance through the integration of public and private data, the “Internet of Things,” cloud computing and predictive analytics, to derive insights for land use planning, and delivering improved public services; and
Aggregation of multiple and disparate data sets from several Federal agencies into an insightful data suite of knowledge to drive business decisions.
The NTIS Joint Ventures also could help address time-to-market innovations and complexity of solutions, and facilitate new partnerships with the private sector focused on delivering value for public service, business outcomes, and economic growth.

[Commentary] Fun fact: The world’s premier weather watcher, storm chaser and climate monitor – aka, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – gathers enough data every single day to fill the Library of Congress twice. The public also owns countless other terabytes of data that the Department of Commerce produces every day: Economic data, from jobs to paychecks to the products and services we make, provide and sell. Trade data – imports and exports – drilled down to the commodity and the community. Patent and trademark data about inventions and brands, from the first patent in 1790 for Samuel Hopkins’ crop fertilizer ingredient, signed by President Washington, to Patent 9371560 last month for, “methods for the automated reconstruction of a genotype of a gene, fragment, or genomic region using exhaustive enumeration.” The list of invaluable data that Commerce produces goes on and on.

As Secretary Pritzker said, Commerce is “America’s Data Agency.” “No other department,” she said, “can rival the reach, depth, and breadth of our data programs.” I’ve reiterated in my blogs how making the vast trove of Commerce data more accessible, useful and usable to the nation is one of the five pillars of Secretary Pritzker’s “Open for Business” strategy. And now ESA is on point to help advance the data pillar. But another job we all share is to advance one of the other five pillars, operational excellence.