CDO Council 2022 Survey Results

Published: September 01, 2022

Federal Market AnalysisBig DataInformation Technology

In its second annual survey of CDOs across federal agencies, the CDO Council found that the responsibilities, obstacles, and overall state of a federal CDO continue to evolve.

The role of a Chief Data Officer (CDO) in the federal government has increased and evolved in recent years, particularly in response to the Evidence Act of 2017. To capture these changes, the CDO Council issued its second annual survey to federal CDOs, and the results are in.

The survey asked a series of questions surrounding the demographics, responsibilities, needs and challenges of federal CDOs. Results were grouped by agency sizes: small, medium and large. By grouping respondents by agency size, several themes emerged between the small and medium agencies and their larger counterparts:

  • The CDO role is not the primary responsibility for respondents at small and medium agencies
  • Small and medium agencies do not typically have Key Performance Indicators or other performance measures for their CDO offices
  • The majority of CDOs from small and medium agencies directly report to an agency head or deputy head, while the many large agency CDOs report to the CIO or other positions at their organizations
  • Small, medium and large agency data officials reported working most with mission, administrative and operational data. A few agencies reported fundamentally working with statistical, commercially acquired, unstructured and geospatial data.

The CDO Council survey also identified respondents’ key areas of responsibilities, finding that medium and large agencies have more responsibilities in most areas than smaller agencies. This theme held true in areas such as data policy, data governance, open data, information collections/Paperwork Reduction Act, quality management, data evangelism, data visualization, data ambassador, and artificial intelligence.

Moreover, the survey asked CDO participants for their current goals, greatest obstacles and needs for success. Of note, limited data access and cultural barriers grew under CDO’s greatest obstacles from 2021 to 2022. Below are the results for each category from most popular to least (top to bottom):

Source: CDO Council

As in last year’s survey, CFO-Act agencies reported hiring more contractors than non-CFO Act agencies. Likewise, those with higher Full-Time Employees (FTEs) also relied on a larger number of contractors. The below chart depicts the sum of FTEs and Contractors among CFO Act and Non-CFO Act agency respondents and reveals that the CDO role/office continues to rely heavily on contractor support.  

Source: CDO Council

In response to the question on the type of work CDOs have hired consultants or outsourced, respondents from large and medium agencies reported the following:

Source: CDO Council

While the survey anonymizes the names and agencies of CDO respondents, the CDO Council’s survey results help industry to identify areas of need, priority and work surrounding these offices. Based on the results of the survey, contractors are in good position to find a variety of business opportunities within CDO offices at agencies moving forward.

For more insight into the trends and drivers shaping the federal big data marketplace, refer to Deltek’s Federal Big Data Market, 2022-2024 report.