It wasn’t so long ago that roles such as Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer were the domain of the private sector, but the government has been catching up. Government Technology now reports that another technology focused role has been on the rise, the State Chief Data Officer. Their reporting found that 28 states now have a CDO position or one with an equivalent title. An additional seven states are exploring or planning on creating the role.
The role of the Chief Data Officer, at its core, is to ensure that the correct, quality data is being gathered and shared to monitor effectiveness, advise decisions, and respond to crises. The position is also relatively new, the first State CDO didn’t exist until Colorado created the job in 2011. The increasing importance of the role has come with a recognition of the value of the data that states have, which would have been previously managed by a CIO or CTO.
GovTech interviewed the founder of the State Chief Data Officers Network, Tyler Kleykamp, who compared managing data to traditional asset management. The three key aspects of managing both are maintenance (life-cycle management), accountability (an inventory of data), and putting it to the highest and best use (innovating uses for existing data).
This puts the CDO in a position to not just manage disparate sets of data, but to be able to support policymakers, providing analytics that can help justify a piece of legislation or even cause politicians to rethink things regarding a bill’s efficacy or its unintended consequences. This can’t happen, though, without open lines of communication. CDOs won’t be able to find the answers to questions that aren’t asked, and cross-agency data sharing means there are more problems than ever that can be plausibly solved with data, particularly in fields that relate to multiple government services like healthcare.
To aid in sharing across more than just different agencies within a state, Kleykamp’s organization acts as a resource for all state CDOs, providing guidance for better data use. The organization also hosts events, which include CDOs imparting their knowledge and experience to their counterparts in other states.
The conclusions that a CDO draws will only be as good as the data that informs them. Extract helps state and local government automatically index information from files like land records and court documents and also automates redaction of PII, allowing for more open sharing of documents interdepartmentally or with the public.
If your agency uses an error-prone, time-consuming manual process for either indexing or redaction, please reach out to us today and we’d be happy to show you how our solution works.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.