Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of the Department of Defense and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, issued a memorandum that seeks to ensure U.S. competitive advantage by turning DOD into a data-centric organization, DOD News reported Monday.
The May 5 memo with the subject Creating Data Advantage calls for the Pentagon to implement five data decrees, including publishing data assets in the department’s federated data catalog along with common interface specifications, maximizing data sharing and rights for data use and implementing best practices for secure authentication, encryption, monitoring, access management and protection of data in use, in transit and at rest.
The data decrees seeks to achieve transformative proficiency and efficiency across the focus areas of the department’s data strategy: joint all domain operations, executive analytics and senior leader decision support.
The document authorizes the DOD chief data officer to lead and issue guidance regarding the department’s data ecosystems, data architecture, data ready workforce and data lifecycle management.
Hicks has ordered the department’s CDO to come up with a status report on five initiatives by June 15.
Some of those efforts are evaluating the establishment of DOD CDO as independent from DOD CIO and developing courses of action to consolidate the office of the secretary of defense’s data initiatives and identifying near-term options to speed up the adoption of enterprise data management and data analytics capability consistent with the guidance. Reports on these efforts are due July 1.
