Laura,
Great to see you here! In the Department of Defense, the DOD Chief Data Officer is in the
Chief Management Officer's office, not under the
DOD CIO -- which is where
enterprise architecture (and by the way
records management policy responsibility) lives. The DOD CDO position was created in early 2018. The first and current DOD CIO is
Michael Conlin. Here's
a recent article with some of his thoughts. If you look at the
DOD CMO organizational chart, you can see that Mr. Conlin heads up the "Data Insights" office which has Data Governance and Data Science under its purview. From where I sit, this division of responsibilities between the CDO and the CIO is problematic.
When the CDO position was created, there were some writings that made the distinction between data in "operational systems," and data in "business systems." The gist was that the new CDO would be focused on data in "operational systems," not "business systems." I didn't like that as my data at the Joint Staff is mostly "business system" data, but it definitely affects the operational military forces of the U.S.
This construct continued to bug me when the DOD CIO published a
Digital Modernization Strategy this past June. In that document, on page 9, there's a graphic depicting a hierarchy of strategy documents aligned under the National Securit Strategy showing where this digital modernization strategy falls. There is no data strategy in the hierarchy, but later in the year, a new draft DOD Data Strategy was circulated for coordination. I do not think that strategy has gone final yet. There was no cross-reference to the digital modernization strategy in the draft data strategy I saw. By the way, there are 21 references to "IT architecture" in the digital modernization strategy.
The bottom line, it doesn't look like a clean integration at this point for DOD. Strategically, I like the old
Knowledge Management pyramid model when thinking about this, but I mentally substitute "Decision/Situational Awareness" for "Wisdom" at the top. Putting data, information, records, knowledge, cyber, IT, Business Process Management (BPM) and related fields in different silos is not helpful. I don't think it's particularly helpful to separate business data from operational data. When you start exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), etc., the poor organization ensures there will always be missing stakeholders in at least the early meetings on any project. I also think data is data, whether structured or unstructured, which blurs the distinction between data and information...information sometimes defined as "data in context."
We need to think -- and organize ourselves -- more holistically. For example, DOD has a fairly new AI strategy which comes under the DOD CIO's office. The principle document is classified, but here's
a good unclassified supplement. The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), under the DOD CIO, was created as that strategy was being developed. There may be an informal relationship with the CDO in the CMO's office, but it appears that's it.
I hope this rambling response is at least interesting if not helpful!
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Mark Patrick, CIP, CDR USN (Ret.)
Immediate Past Chair, Board of Directors
AIIM International
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-22-2019 12:01
From: Laura Downey
Subject: Chief Data Officer
So, we are standing up a Chief Data Officer (CDO) function at my agency. I'm interested in hearing about how others see the CDO function -- what it is, where it lives, what it is responsible for etc. I see lots of overlap with the CIO and Enterprise Architecture.
Does all of information governance and management live under the CDO now? What about information/data architecture? Some folks see info/data management as a subset of info/data architecture, others don't. I have also seen various takes on the difference between info/data governance and info/data management. Does all of analytics live under the CDO?
I'm going to be chairing the Enterprise Information/Data Governance Board. Does anyone have an example of a charter or description of a similar function? I'd love to hear some lessons learned too. I have my own perspective but want to hear from others.
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Laura Downey, PhD
Chief, Applied Architecture
TSA
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