Enabling Public Sector Environmental Stewardship Through Technological Innovation
To catalyze innovation, you need to know your starting point. These Innovation Indicators are our experimental metrics for tracking trends and interventions associated with technological adoption.
They illustrate the teams, processes, culture and organizational dynamics that enable agencies to develop, procure, and use innovative technology for environmental stewardship.
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The foundation of navigation is knowing where you are so you can accurately plot steps to where you are going. This holds as true for agencies’ innovation journeys as it did for the earliest explorers of Earth’s oceans. Innovation Indicators are a series of experimental metrics that offer insight into environmental agencies’ progress on the development of culture, talent, and processes conducive to technology driven innovation for accelerating environmental outcomes.
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These are experimental and provisional - we will refine the Indicators as we learn more and gain deeper insight into how best to evaluate technological innovation across agencies. The Indicators are most effective for tracking progress, setting goals, and benchmarking against similar organizations. It’s important to differentiate between Innovation Indicators and key performance indicators (KPIs). Innovation Indicators are a means whereas KPIs are an end. Focusing on mission over metrics is key. Open source software development does not protect wetlands in and of itself. Using it towards that purpose can boost contributions to the solution and accelerate actions that do preserve and expand wetlands across the country.
Most Environmental Agencies are Underhiring Tech Talent
*Compares Actual IT Specialist job listings posted by each agency in the time period vs the Expected number of those postings relative to their total number of hiring actions and sister agency averages.
Environmental Agencies Need to Open their Doors to Innovation
In our first iteration with Innovation Indicators it’s clear that environmental agencies have significant room to grow their cultures and skillsets to accelerate program impacts. Even at the top end of the spectrum, agencies like NOAA and USGS have room to increase the use of challenges and balance their technical talent ratios. Agencies that lag on these indicators can take heart that they have significant flexibility in building a pathway forward, and take inspiration from the variety of strategies and tactics available to increase innovative practices for program delivery.
Three big takeaways:
Staffing and hiring data imply that technical responsibilities are being loaded onto non-technology roles over time.
Environmental agencies are no longer issuing prize competitions as a means to technological innovation.
Investing in open source software development is one of the most immediate actions environmental agencies can take to accelerate impact and attract innovative talent.
Environmental Agencies’ Don’t Offer Technical Prize Competitions
*The number of OS repositories divided by the amount of mission and mission-related IT funding.
Agencies Diverge Sharply in their Use of Open Source Development
| Environmental Agency | Github Repositories | Unique Contributors | Commit Count | Repositories per Million* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | 512 | 4,506 | 323,613 | 0.223 |
| Environmental Protection Agency | 290 | 951 | 83,082 | 0.196 |
| U.S. Army Corps of Engineers | 63 | 203 | 5,503 | 0.105 |
| National Park Service | 59 | 171 | 10,187 | 0.100 |
| U.S. Geological Survey | 50 | 305 | 32,851 | 0.043 |
| U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | 21 | 31 | 2,287 | 0.065 |
| Bureau of Reclamation | 7 | 40 | 1,421 | 0.014 |
| Forest Service | 7 | 69 | 14,394 | 0.003 |
| Natural Resources Conservation Service | 5 | 8 | 130 | 0.009 |
| Bureau of Land Management | 2 | 3 | 11 | 0.004 |
Explore the indicators
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Workforces with a healthy ratio of technical to non-technical talent can react to innovation opportunities more quickly and effectively while performing mission critical upkeep and collaboration duties.
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Increasing the share of roles focused on innovative technologies and practices is critical to finding novel solutions that accelerate environmental outcomes.
People
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Challenges are explicitly a catalyst for innovative public-private partnership; evaluating their use assesses the extent to which agencies are prioritizing innovation over familiarity.
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Open source software development with a contemporary codebase is the gold standard for innovation, prioritizing transparency, collaboration, and modernity produces more effective and efficient tooling.
Partnerships
Innovation Indicators Technical Resources
This document outlines the data sources and methods used for the indicators.
Methodology
This GitHub repository contains the code for our tool.
Project Repository
Have feedback or ideas for new indicators?
Get in touch! We will continue to investigate and refine these metrics, and add others. We welcome feedback on what has been shown so far, as well as recommendations for other measures of technological innovation in government agencies.