What Is the Federal Data Strategy?
The Federal Data Strategy describes a 10-year vision for how the government will “accelerate the use of data to deliver on mission, serve the public, and steward resources while protecting security, privacy, and confidentiality,” OMB notes.
The strategy is designed to guide federal data management and use via a mission statement, 10 operating principles and a set of 40 best practices to guide agencies in leveraging the value of federal and federally sponsored data.
The principles are grouped around ideas of ethical governance (uphold ethics, exercise responsibility and promote transparency); conscious design (ensure relevance, harness existing data, anticipate future uses and demonstrate responsiveness); and promoting a learning culture (invest in learning, develop data leaders and practice accountability).
All agencies are required to implement the strategy through annual governmentwide action plans.
The 2020 Action Plan, which was impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, identified initial actions for agencies that are “essential for establishing processes, building capacity, and aligning existing efforts to better leverage data as a strategic asset.”
The CDO Council met 11 times in 2020 and focused much of last year on “on setting up its governance structure, building a CDO community and relationships with other intergovernmental councils and groups, sharing best practices/lessons learned, strategic planning, and supporting CDOs in their implementation of the Federal Data Strategy (FDS) Action Plans,” according to a report the council sent earlier this year to Congress and OMB. According to a survey of federal chief data officers released in August 2020, more than half of those surveyed reported improvements in data quality (64 percent), assessment of staff capabilities and needs (57 percent), migration to cloud-based services (57 percent), and availability of metadata (54 percent).
It’s unclear when the government will release the 2021 Action Plan, but it seems as though it is high on Martorana’s agenda. “We can make the most of government data by making it easily shareable, adopting common standards, and improving data management,” she said in May, as MeriTalk reports.
EXPLORE: How does the Federal Data Strategy enable cooperation on data projects?
Chief Data Officer vs. Chief Information Officer: What’s the Difference?
In a May survey by the CDO Council, more than a quarter of respondents said they report directly to the head of their agencies, while another quarter of respondents said they report to their agencies’ CIOs.
What’s the difference between a CDO and a CIO? As Deloitte notes in a report on the CIO/chief digital officer relationship a CIO is responsible “for provisioning the lower levels of the technology stack, ranging from (hybrid) cloud services to shared platforms and databases.”