“Federal agencies have been in an ongoing pursuit of harnessing the power of data. Recently, this has manifested with agencies establishing chief data officers, strategies and governance structures.
Data leaders from the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services provided a glimpse of their strategic work around data, highlighting that various organizational structures, governance and business value are key to their current and ongoing plans…”
“Over at HHS, Chief Data Scientist Kristen Honey agreed that not only are business needs, governance and structure important to realizing success with data, but also collaboration and implementation of work.
As HHS was standing up its CDO office, the COVID-19 pandemic was escalating as the center of the agency’s work. Honey highlighted how data leadership at HHS collaborated with other health agencies to establish HHS Protect, a centralized data platform to examine and use COVID-19 data to drive the pandemic response. While partnerships with other agencies and industry were central to the success of the platform, Honey said she and other data leaders are taking the best practices, standards, infrastructure and culture that HHS developed throughout the pandemic to fuel future data-driven projects and needs across the agency.
‘Currently, we’re collaborating here at HHS with the Census Bureau, Department of Commerce, EPA and others, and we’re doing another full-length tech sprint beyond only COVID and health that’s also addressing climate change, environmental issues and how do you transform federal open data into digital tools that’ll get on the market quickly and have real-world impact,’ Honey said…” Read the full article here.
Source: Structure, Governance Key to Data Planning, Agency Leaders Say – By Melissa Harris, November 17, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
