Adding Value: U.S. Office of Personnel Management as Research Collaborator

• Author: Katherine Archuleta
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12360
• Date: 01 May 2015

Perspective

Katherine Archuleta is director of

the U.S. Off‌i ce of Personnel Management.

Since becoming director more than a

year ago, she has been a champion of a

diverse, engaged, and inclusive federal

workforce. She is the f‌i rst Latina to head

OPM. Archuleta began her career as a

schoolteacher in Denver, Colorado, and

later worked in local and state government.

She held executive positions in the U.S.

Departments of Transportation and Energy

during the Bill Clinton administration and

was chief of staff to Labor Secretary Hilda

Solis during the early part of the Barack

Obama administration.

Twitter: @OPMDirector

Adding Value: U.S. Off‌i ce of Personnel Management as Research Collaborator 357

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 3, pp. 357–358. Published 2015.

This article is a U.S. Government work and

is in the public domain in the USA.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12360.

The copyright line for this article was

changed on 30 March 2015 after original

online publication.

Katherine Archuleta

U.S. Off‌i ce of Personnel Management

In inclement weather, federal employees turn to

the U.S. Of‌f‌i ce of Personnel Management (OPM)

to learn whether government of‌f‌i ces in the nation’s

capital are open or closed. Retirees contact us to f‌i nd

out the status of their annuity payments, and job

applicants peruse USAJOBS to f‌i nd interesting career

opportunities. OPM is less well known for the data it

holds and the potential for that data to inform human

resource policies and practices.

Approximately one year ago, within a week of becom-

ing Director of OPM, I held a discussion with my

senior leadership team that led to the adoption of this

strategic goal: OPM will “serve as the thought leader

in research and data-driven human resource man-

agement and policy decision making.”1 A key tactic

supporting that goal is developing partnerships with

academic institutions, think tanks, and industry to

share data, exchange ideas, and collaborate on research

and analysis.

While we have always had relationships with aca-

demic institutions, I want OPM to play a dif‌f erent

role. Historically, OPM has been a supplier of data

to researchers and analysts. But I think that we can

add more value by also being a research collaborator.

A good example is the STEM (Science, Technology,

Engineering, and Mathematics) Data Jam that

we sponsored in 2014. OPM staf‌f partnered with

industry and academic experts to develop a half dozen

innovative ways of using OPM data to aid in the

recruitment and retention of STEM professionals in

the federal government. We are following up on this

work and hope to support several STEM products in

the near future.

In October 2014, OPM released a report titled

Millennials: Finding Opportunity in Federal Service.2 To

produce this report, we used data from the Enterprise

Human Resource Integration data warehouse and the

Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. We followed

up the millennial report with one on educational

attainment by federal employees during their careers,

Making the Grade:  e Story of an Increasingly

Well-Educated Federal Workforce.3

 ese reports are important not only because their

content sheds light on important characteristics of

federal employees but also because they demonstrate

how we are using multiple databases and, in some

instances, merging databases to create new infor-

mation. For example, the Making the Grade report

tracked a cohort of employees who entered federal

service with a high school degree as their highest level

of educational attainment. It revealed that 86 percent

of those employees went on to obtain a higher level

of education while they worked and that many

of them increased their own earning power while

bringing more value to the government in terms of

additional skill sets and their ability to handle more

responsibility.

We will do more reports like this in the coming

months and years. We welcome your ideas for future

reports and collaborative research. OPM staf‌f mem-

bers are reaching out to academics and researchers

because we want to know the questions you are

trying to answer and the data and analyses you need

to answer those questions. For years, we have made

available descriptive data on the federal workforce

through our public-facing digital tool FedScope.4

Survey data are available through FedView.5 In addi-

tion, we provide customized views of the data not

available on these websites upon request. Over time,

we would like to make a greater variety of data avail-

able to researchers. For example, we are developing

data warehouses on available jobs and job applicants

derived from USAJOBS and on health care costs and

quality derived from the Federal Employees Health

Benef‌i ts program.

We welcome academic partners who would like to

collaborate. Ultimately, by involving more people

using more of our information, we will improve

public policy and improve the services we deliver to

our customers.

Adding Value: U.S. Of‌f‌i ce of Personnel Management

as Research Collaborator