Agencies are facing significant challenges attracting and hiring top talent for positions involved in privacy issues–in particular involving the protection of personal information agencies hold–and agencies need to provide more education, training and professional development opportunities for those employees, OMB has said.
OMB also recognizes that there is no career path for privacy in the government, director Shaun Donovan said in a speech at a recent privacy conference involving federal officials.
One way of addressing personnel needs, he said, will be through establishing a new Federal Privacy Council. That will be designed to foster strategic thinking on privacy, coordinate and share ideas and best practices, and assess and develop recommendations for the attracting and hiring top talent.
“We need capable privacy professionals on the ground and at the table to evaluate privacy risks on an ongoing basis . . . It is time to stop re-inventing the privacy wheel at agencies and do a better job of leveraging the success of each agency’s related efforts. It is time to shift from reactive programs to proactive strategies. And it is time to ‘professionalize’ the privacy profession,” he said.
Also, he said, OMB will update government-wide policies–some of which hasn’t been revised since 2000–on issues including managing federal information resources, the Privacy Act, and responding to data breaches that impact personal information. That will include a new approach to continuous privacy monitoring and ensuring that agencies coordinate on privacy and information security, he said.
