Embracing a data-first approach has helped the U.S. Postal Service live up to its “always on” mission, the agency’s chief information officer said Thursday, paving the way for major product wins and the successful adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
Speaking at FedScoop’s FedTalks event in Washington, D.C., USPS CIO Pritha Mehra said the independent executive branch agency set up an internal “data group” that now assesses any new application under consideration for use.
That data group, which created a data governance policy for the agency, works with the USPS business and IT units on “common definitions” — an especially critical piece of the puzzle given the 110 petabytes of data it handles.
“All data is enterprise, and everybody needs to have the same definition of data,” Mehra said. “Cataloging and curating and tagging and snagging — whatever you want to call it, data is really important.”
