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Cost Estimating NewsBrief: April 25, 2025
Air Force lacks critical skills in digital fluency, data analysis
(Federal News Network) The Air Force faces critical skill gaps in digital fluency, multi-domain operations, strategic decision-making, intelligence analysis and collaboration with allies — capabilities experts say are essential for modern warfare but remain underdeveloped across the service. Following sweeping organizational changes announced in February 2024, then – Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall commissioned a RAND study to help identify critical skill gaps among active-duty Airmen. An effort, known as Reoptimizing for Great Power Competition, included a total of 24 changes or action items that were divided into four categories: developing people, generating readiness, projecting power and developing capabilities. Read More
GAO suggests policy reform to mitigate generative AI’s human, environmental risks
(Fedscoop) While leaders in Washington have the option to maintain the status quo around artificial intelligence, the Government Accountability Office suggests that legislators and policymakers take action to address the negative effects AI has on the public and the environment. In a report released Tuesday on generative AI’s human and environmental effects, the federal watchdog said that Congress, agencies and industry could encourage AI developers to use government frameworks, like those that come from GAO or the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to defend against harmful AI-generated content that compromises safety, security and privacy. Read More
How to Make Data Work Meaningful
(MIT Sloan Management Review) For all the emphasis on employee satisfaction in recent years, the experiences of millions of workers have worsened. The latest Gallup poll on the topic, from November 2024, found only 18% of U.S. workers are satisfied with their company. After holding steady at more than a quarter of employees during the previous decade, satisfaction scores plummeted in 2021 and have not recovered. Engagement, meanwhile, is down to 30%, the lowest it’s been since 2013. Organizations are struggling to make changes that really work for their staff. Three key factors most powerfully affect how people feel about their work: belonging, configuration, and inspiration or purpose. Read More
The missing data link: Five practical lessons to scale your data products
(McKinsey Digital) Imagine you were a railway executive with a contract to transport valuable cargo across the country. You wouldn’t have a different engine pulling each individual car of cargo. It would be much more efficient and cost-effective to hitch as many cargo cars as possible to the same engine. In fact, you would want a standard set of trains and connectors that would allow you to pull different kinds of cargo anywhere. This analogy is particularly germane to the world of data products. Scale and value come from treating a data product like an engine that can support a large number of high-value use cases (or cars). Unfortunately, when it comes to data products, companies are operating much more along the single engine–single car model. Read More
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