Federal Government's Suzette Kent on Federal Data Strategy and IT Modernization

Nov 11, 2020

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Joining Cindi today is Suzette Kent, the former US Federal Chief Information Officer. Suzette joined the Federal Government in 2018 from the financial services industry with two key goals: drive IT modernization and overcome the challenges in federal IT budgeting and funding alignment.

On this episode, Suzette and Cindi discuss the creative friction between the public and private sector, the pros and cons of how the public and private sectors operate and what they can gain by collaborating with one another, and the challenges of avoiding minutiae and focusing on the big picture when working with massive datasets. Plus, Suzette shares the origin story of the federal data strategy and how she hopes it can be used to solve the problems we face today.

Key Takeaways & Discussion Points:

Creative friction happens when private and public sectors collaborate and each side benefits from the experience.
You can't drive change only from a technology side; people need to be involved in the process, and this requires adaptation to the pace necessary for the task at hand.
Why striking a balance between indexing details and focusing on outcomes can be particularly challenging when you're dealing with the overwhelming number of datasets available to the public sector, the laws that govern their use, and the sometimes conflicting purposes of multiple agencies within that structure.
How the federal data strategy came about, what it strives to accomplish, what private sector CDOs can learn about it at strategy.data.gov, and how they can utilize the resources available at resources.data.gov.
The outcome-driven approach to getting students truly interested in pursuing careers in data.

More About Suzette:

Suzette Kent served from 2018 to 2020 as US Federal Chief Information Officer, spearheading a wide range of technology and workforce initiatives. Her tenure was devoted to setting governmentwide standards while also giving agencies the freedom to tailor efforts in mission-appropriate ways.

Suzette was selected from the financial services industry to replace outgoing Federal CIO Tony Scott. She was a principal with Ernst & Young and had been a managing partner at Accenture and worked in other capacities at JP Morgan and the Carreker Corp. This background allowed her to see the challenges in federal IT budgeting and funding alignment and its IT modernization.

The Data Chief is brought to you by ThoughtSpot. For more on how the most successful data leaders are driving value in their organizations, join Cindi and the ThoughtSpot team at Beyond 2020, the leading data & analytics event of the year. Go to www.thoughtspot.com/beyond2020 for more information.

For full show notes and more, go to thedatachief.com.

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.