Wisconsin Poised to Hire a Chief Analytics Officer

Increasingly, states are hiring chief data officers, who are tasked with taking all the data collected across the enterprise and determining what can be done with it in the public interest — to fight the opioid crisis, for example. Tellingly, this month saw the first meeting of the State Data Officer Network, a collaboration two years in the making.

Not to be left behind, Wisconsin is looking to hire its own version of the CDO: a chief analytics officer, state CIO David Cagigal told GT at the NASCIO annual conference in October.

“I don’t like the CDO terminology, chief data officer,” Cagigal said. “We need more than just the data out of what we’re going to be doing, so the chief analytics officer really resonates with me.”

That new hire will spend a year looking at how they can take Wisconsin’s abundance of data and turn it into usable information. Cagigal anticipates they can use that work to really change social outcomes, such as drawing correlations between high school graduation rates and incarceration, and how those conclusions could lead to better use of state funding.

The state also plans to partner with the University of Wisconsin to maximize its data efforts. Cagigal said that it plans to give some of its many data sets to the school’s new Computer, Data, and Information Sciences program, to allow students to work on real-world business cases that will result in mutual gain for all parties.