Avi Bender: Federal Gov’t Needs Innovative Measures to Implement Shared Services for Data

Avi Bender, director of the Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service, told FedScoop in an interview published Monday that the federal government should identify innovative approaches to shared services implementation and consider additional procurement instruments that are suitable for data management.

“Data management is an ongoing innovation effort that requires continuous and iterative learning, continuous agility and discovery of new opportunities,” he said.

“And sometimes the contract mechanism or the [Federal Acquisition Regulation] is not ideally suited for that, so I think we need to look at different acquisition instruments.”

Bender noted that federal agencies should consider themselves as “big data organizations” and emphasized the need to build up the workforce to support data-centric programs and information technology modernization.

He also cited how NTIS works to help agencies address issues through private sector collaboration.