CDO Council Goals and Objectives

The criticality of data in the federal space has gained strong momentum in recent years. Not only has a solid data foundation proven to bolster agency capabilities, the recent pandemic has also shown data readiness is vital to unforeseen events and emergencies. As such, a relatively new interagency group called the Chief Data Officer (CDO) Council seeks to improve the management, use, security and collection of data in government decision-making and operations. As a reminder, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 provided the authority for the council, requiring the membership of federal Chief Data Officers and related components to achieve such objectives.  

In a recent article describing the group’s first year, Council Chair Ted Kaouk, the Chief Data Officer (CDO) at USDA, states that cross collaboration with councils is key. The article proceeds to list eight federal councils the CDO council interacts with to implement its mission, which include the Federal Chief Information Officers, Chief Evaluation Officers, Privacy Councils, and the Federal Geographic Data Committee, and Interagency Council on Statistical Policy.

Moreover, the council established the following five working groups along with the Small Agency and CFO Act Agency Committees to establish its vision:

The CDO Council reported activities for four of the five working groups and the two committees within its first report to Congress.

However, what really drove the council’s FY 2021 goals and objectives is the COVID-19 pandemic. Premiering in January 2020, the council had little time to establish itself before the demand for data and decision support tools to respond to the unprecedented event, describes Kaouk. In fact, the pandemic proved to the council that data across federal agencies existed to answer pandemic questions on public health, workforce safety and continuity of operations, yet challenges arose in actually accessing that data. In response, the council worked across agency borders to build dashboards and other tools to ensure public health data availability and decision-making. The lessons learned and gaps identified by the pandemic provided a backdrop to the council’s following FY 2021 goals and objectives, according to Kaouk:

Source: CDO Council

While these FY 2021 goals and objectives aim to establish the CDO Council as an entity, and reflect pandemic experiences, we already have a sense of what the FY 2022 set might look like. The Biden Administration has stressed the integrity of science and technology-based data for evidence-based decision-making. Undoubtedly, this priority will have a growing presence in the CDO Council’s forthcoming activities.  

In January, President Biden signed the Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking to reaffirm scientific and technological evidence-based policy decisions. Specifically, the memorandum directs the Office of Science and Technology and agency heads to review and report their own scientific-integrity policies to develop, update, plan, implement and share plans that form evidence-based policies.

The policy also outlines several actions items for the CDO Council: incorporate scientific-integrity policies into government-wide best practices, ensure government and non-government access to federal data collected from federal, state, local and tribal governments, and develop agency data plans that provide a framework for ongoing data use and access.

Given all this, contractors can expect an emphasis on data inventory, accessibility,, interoperability, integrity and security to be at the top of the CDO Council’s “to-do” list for the rest of this year, and the next.