Template Municipal CDO Description

Chief Data Officer
City of []

The collection and need for data continues to grow exponentially in organizations. Increasingly, data itself–outside of application–has values supporting organizations mission and activities. Data has even more value if it is readily available, easily found, and easily reusable for new applications.
The city has a clear a vision of data leveraged as an asset for data-driven decision-making and for citizen engagement. 

The Chief Data Officer (CDO) is the role primarily responsible for operationalizing that vision. The CDO leads the city’s efforts to put its data to work for data-driven decision-making and performance management as well as its goal to be an open, engagement, and transparent institution. Operationally, this means improving links between data from different departments for a holistic view of the city; making information/data easier to find online for the public; and enabling policy-makers to quickly access and transform data into insights and decisions. 

The Chief Data officer’s role is part data strategist and adviser, part steward for improving data quality, part evangelist for data sharing, part technologist, and part developer of new data products.

Responsibilities
 - Ensure data is available, reliable, consistent, accessible, secure, and timely to support the mission and activities of the agency.
 - Drive a data-driven decision-making program in the city to increase the city’s use of data at critical moments by creating easy-to-use tools (i.e. dashboards, visualizations) and training staff within departments on how to better analyze their own data.
 - Improve how the city collects, uses, manages, and publishes data; align and standardizing data models; ensure data quality and assess the city measures data quality.
 - Manage open government data effort including coordinating how we offer publicly available sets, APIs, and data products (i.e. maps, charts, and apps).
 - Lead the city’s involvement with various data-focused civic society groups to increase the usage of our data, bring back feedback to accordingly improve the data’s utility
 - Head up city-wide data-working group to improve data literacy and usage across departments

Skills
 - Technically strong, with experience using and building software applications that employ (open) data, and experience with data analytics and performance management systems.
 - Proven leader, with experience developing, implementing, and communicating plans for broad organizational change, and comfort with public speaking and evangelism
 - Awareness of and experience with data storage, publication, and visualization tools (e.g. MongoDB, MySQL, APIs, GIS, data portals, etc)
 - Solid understanding of government processes and practices, specifically in those areas that are data intensive - planning & zoning process, education, public safety, etc.

As an applicant, I'd want to know there would be an expectation to improve internal processes not just to develop public data offerings. I use a job listing to gauge if a organization understands what they are getting themselves into, or if they're just paying lip service to a trend.

I'd suggest splitting the responsibilities into two sections, listing expected responsibilities for internal and external audiences or programs with example KPIs or measurable outcomes for work performance.

I'd also look for someone who was at least minimally familiar with data privacy or security laws, and understood implicitly the impact of human bias in algorithm design. Then expand responsibilities to include negotiating data sharing agreements between departments, agencies, universities, researchers and/or the public.

Are there plans to start tackling other roles below C-suite?