A decade of data at Transportation

If there's a dean of the federal chief data officer community, it's Dan Morgan. When Morgan joined federal service in July 2014 as the first-ever chief data officer at the Department of Transportation, he ran a one-man show. Today, under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, large federal agencies are required to have a CDO. The law also established a Federal Chief Data Officers Council, along the lines of other federal communities of practice. 

The CDO operation at DOT now boasts a full-time staff of 14 feds plus contractor support. Morgan himself serves on the executive committee of the CDO Council and recently wound up a term as vice chair. 

He spoke with Nextgov/FCW in July ahead of his 10-year anniversary on the job. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nextgov/FCW: You were the original CDO at the Transportation Department. How has the job changed over the years? 

Dan Morgan: When I began, open data was really controlling the conversation, and what started to happen in the wake of me starting was also a really big emphasis on financial transparency and high-quality open data. 

So the DATA Act happened before the Evidence Act happened. [The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act required federal agencies to publish financial and spending data in open, machine-readable formats. - Ed.] Maybe because it was called the DATA Act, it turned into something that I got involved with. And it was an incredible partnership between me as a brand-new chief data officer and our chief financial officer, working through the implementation issues inside the agency. 

It was a great opportunity to get exposed to how many different parts of government get involved in a project like this — from budget officers to financial managers to procurement to financial assistance to contractor registrations at [the General Services Administration] to everything we do inside the agency itself. It's a really, really huge project, but I think it helped solidify some of the thinking that we do around open data and the best practices.

Nextgov/FCW: And the Evidence Act followed not long after the DATA Act.

Morgan: And what the Evidence Act does is it doubles down on open data and makes what was executive branch policy law. But then it says, 'Hey, remember, there's a whole lifecycle here.' And so the job expands. It's no longer just about open data driving your work. It's about lifecycle management and strong data management practices and building that foundation. 

At the same time, my chief data officer family had been growing along the way. And all of a sudden my family got huge because every agency got a chief data officer, which was awesome. Now I have people to talk to, which is kind of important, it turns out. But I think what the Evidence Act actually has done has helped us level up the conversation. To take the fullness of the data lifecycle and really bring data management practices from beginning to end. Alongside that came the federal data strategy. 

Nextgov/FCW: How is DOT using open data?

Morgan: There's really wonderful open data stories inside the DOT, and I can't take any credit for them. The reason that you can track a plane moving across your phone screen to see when your loved ones are going to land is because the Federal Aviation Administration was good at open data long before I got here. The reason there are companies like FlightRadar24 and FlightAware is because the FAA is good at open data. We don't talk about that story enough.

I work in a culture that is very much about openness and collaboration. The Department of Transportation is, I think, unique among other federal agencies, because we work so much with state and local governments. But to build good transportation projects, it requires community engagement. And to build a good transportation project, you don't just need transportation data. You need information about the Earth. You need information about the soil, you need information about the weather. All of those things don't come from the U.S. Department of Transportation. They come from other federal agencies. It's the power of all of those open data sets that allows us to understand the environment where we're trying to build these projects.

Nextgov/FCW: And how has that changed over the years? The ability to cross-pollinate with other agencies and their data? Is it easier to do now than it was? 

Morgan: No. That's why the CDO Council has a Data Sharing Working Group. I think the challenges are well-documented, and the solutions are not easy. 

But I think a lot of the guidance that we have is written for a very human environment. If you want to get to a better place, we need to write guidance for a machine-to-machine kind of contract, and learn to trust each other because we have to have shared baselines. We'll never achieve our machine hopes and dreams if we continue to write guidance for a human age.

Nextgov/FCW: What kind of experiences and skill sets should people come to the job with? Is there an ideal background for a CDO, or are you looking for a diverse set of skills?

Morgan: I love our diversity. We do an annual survey of ourselves. That was one of the things that I pushed for. So we ask questions about backgrounds, how long people have served in their roles and what their reporting relationships are. 

There are some CDO roles that are very squarely placed inside their missions or in their policy office. And that makes very good sense for them and for their agency because that's where their problems are. There are others who are more aligned with their IT organizations. I'm one of them. We didn't have enterprise tools or a champion for creating some of these enterprise tools for data. We needed to make those investments, and it made sense to be aligned to the CIO. There are CDOs who have systems engineering backgrounds, there are CDOs who have philosophy backgrounds. And I think we're stronger as a community for it. 

Some CDOs are also serving as their agencies' chief AI officers. And that works for them in their agencies. It kind of depends on what's happening with the individual agency.