Last week, the White House announced that DJ Patil will be the first ever Chief Data Scientist and Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy. His job will be to act as an evangelist for new applications of Big Data across all areas of government, with a special focus on healthcare. The US government has come a long way regarding Big Data and President Obama is the most data-driven President ever in office. During last weeks Strata Conference in San Jose, DJ Patil shared with the audience what Obama has done as well as what the US government plans for the coming years with regard to Big Data.
First of all, Obama has created dashboards at Federal level to monitor how major IT technology investments progress. This enables the US government to better control expensive IT projects, something that many governments struggle to achieve.
In addition, he created Data.gov. This platform hosts over 135.000 data sets that can be used by data scientists to explore and experiment with. Especially for new data scientists this is a great place, along with other public data sets from other countries around the world, to start learning data science, which in turn will help you the get hired.
He also has ensured, via an executive order, that open and machine-readable data becomes the new default for the US government. This will therefore increase the amounts of data sets shared by the government, which in turn can drive innovation and economic growth.
But thats not all. The Big Data Report, which was released in May 2014, shows how forward thinking in the US government is regarding Big Data. A big component is the ethics of Big Data and how to ensure privacy for customers and consumers. A lot of governments from around the world could learn from this and should also appoint a Chief Data Scientist to streamline and promote the possibilities and initiatives around Big Data.
With the appointment of DJ Patil the US Government has gone one step further and currently is, according to DJ Patil, more data-driven than most organizations around the world. DJ Patil has worked inside several big-name Silicon Valley operations, including eBay, PayPal, LinkedIn Skype, and venture capital firm Greylock Partners. His mission is to responsibly unleash the power of data for the benefit of the American public and maximize the nations return on its investment in data.
According to DJ Patils presentation at Strata, he has several responsibilities that include:
- Providing vision on how to provide maximum social return on data that is produced as a country;
- Creating nationwide data policies that enable shared services and forward-learning practices to advance our nations leadership in the data age;
- Working with agencies to establish best practices and ensure long term sustainability;
- Recruiting and retaining the best minds in data science for public service to address these data science objectives and act as a conduit between the government, academia and industry
The objective is to create a data-driven government. And according to DJ Patil, a data-driven government responsibly gathers, processes, leverages and releases data in a timely fashion to enable transparency, create efficiencies, provide security and foster innovation.
Appointing a Chief Data Scientist is a great step-forward and more governments should in fact follow the US. When governments actively share their data and create a data-driven environment where data scientists can prosper, it will have a very positive effect on innovation and economic growth. Organizations are hiring Chief Data Scientists and are becoming data-driven, so why cant governments from around the world do the same?
