Karen Evans, chief information officer at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said DHS is looking to hire a new chief data officer to support planning and evaluation work, Nextgov reported Thursday.
She said the new CDO office will have a council composed of chief information officers and chief technology officers and that the CDO will collaborate with the chief financial officer and CXOs in support of the management directorate.
“The chief financial officer also has the performance piece, and the planning and evaluation piece under the data act,” Evans said Thursday during a conference. “And so this office will have that key relationship and that key partnership about building that out, not only within our CXO community but also within our components.”
Evans said she believes the new CDO will likely play a key role in the department’s Cyber Talent Management System and a pilot project that seeks to facilitate COVID-19 vaccine distribution using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“What we're really looking at is how we can do contact tracing for our employees, as well as mapping that up with public health information as it relates to vaccination distribution,” she said, “because what we really need to have is a dashboard, that's going to be able to utilize this data for our senior leadership to be able to do some predictive modeling."