Chief Data Officer Positions Created from Data Bill

Due to the requirements of the new “Government-wide Open Data Bill”, all federal agencies are to publish non-sensitive public information in machine-readable formats. To guarantee the fulfillment of this demand the bill creates Chief Data Officer positions at every federal agency.

The OPEN Government Data Act requires all non-sensitive government data to be made available in open and machine-readable formats by default. It also establishes Chief Data Officers (CDO) at federal agencies, as well as a CDO Council. The law’s mission is to improve operational efficiencies and government services, reduce costs, increase public access to government information, and spur innovation and entrepreneurship. This is a win for evidence-based decision-making within the government.

What is a Chief Data Officer?

A chief data officer (CDO) is a corporate officer responsible for enterprise wide governance and utilization of information as an asset, via data processing, analysis, data mining, information trading and other means.

Many major Banks and Insurance companies, subsequent to the credit crisis of 2008, created the CDO role to ensure data quality and transparency for regulatory and risk management as well as analytic reporting.

Various branches of US Government have CDOs. The CDO role is far more common in the United States than elsewhere. However several European banks have a CDO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_data_officer