Despite the rise of data-driven decision making in government, only three US Cabinet-level agencies have appointed Chief Data Officer. The fourth such Cabinet-level agency could be the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which is currently studying whether to push through with plans to install a CDO. The House of Representatives passed a bill that would have required the DHS to fill the position, but the bill never made it to the Senate.
The DHS is moving its data to the cloud and the big question is how to keep it secure.
Jared Serbu reported on this story for the Federal News Network:
The questions (the DHS) is asking are aligned with the same factors that have pushed other federal agencies to appoint CDOs in recent years: they collect and store vast amounts of information, but a comparatively small amount of that data is rigorously analyzed, or even meaningfully accessible for the purposes of day-to-day business and operational decisions.
“We have this incredibly rich vein of data out there that we just don’t utilize,” said John Zangardi, the department’s chief information officer. “We own it. It’s ours. We need to start tapping into it.”
The DHS management action group, chaired by the deputy secretary, ordered up a study of the CDO issue, set to be conducted over the coming winter. It will be led by Zangardi’s office, and is expected to present its findings in the spring.
