State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Lessons from Leading CDOs

Data-Smart City Solutions: A Chief Data Officer (CDO) can lead a city or state toward greater data-driven government. Leveraging data enables more responsive and rational allocation of government resources to address priority public needs. Data-driven executive leadership in government is relatively new, with just over a dozen cities and a handful of states having named a CDO as of late 2016. There is growing momentum and increasingly frequent news of the next government CDO appointment. While there is a growing proliferation of CDOs in government, there are few resources that describe the landscape, either for the benefit of the chief executive appointing a CDO or the new CDO taking office. This paper intends to help new entrants by documenting selected current practices, including advice shared by existing government CDOs, observations by the author, and analysis from government technology and analytics experts.

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