Chief Data Officer

In Kyle’s wiki the Chief Data Officer (CDO) role surfaces through Tom Schenk, the deputy IT director for the City of Chicago who oversaw the full municipal data lifecycle — database management, BI, data publication, and advanced analytics. Per the Tom Schenk notes, Schenk co-founded a Harvard-based group of Chief Data Officers spanning 25 cities, split roughly evenly across budget office / IT / mayor’s-office reporting lines. That split is itself the interesting data point: the CDO function had no settled home in city government, sitting variously under finance, technology, or the executive depending on the city.

The role is presented as a practical, service-delivery-oriented one rather than a buzzword job — Schenk’s CDO work centered on expanding Chicago’s Open Data Portal, building tools like Open Grid (public) and Windy-Grid (internal), and analytics for food-inspector routing and lead-paint prediction. It is a recurring GovTech theme in the wiki.

Context: “Chief Data Officer” is an executive role, in both companies and governments, responsible for an organization’s data strategy, governance, and analytics. In US municipal government it spread in the 2010s alongside the open-data movement.

Where this appears

• Tom Schenk — Chicago’s deputy IT director, who co-founded a 25-city Harvard-based group of CDOs and exemplifies the practical, open-data flavor of the role.

Adoption curve (February 2022)

Derek Zanutto, general partner at CapitalG, in a Term Sheet Kyle read on February 28th, 2022:

Today 55% of F1000 enterprises have Chief Data Officers. Over the next 3 years, it’ll approach 100%.

The buying-centre shift a lot of data-infrastructure and Data Privacy theses rest on.