This year, the Army will begin sending chief data officers to various commands who will act as a point of contact for “what data they need to get their mission done,” a service official told Breaking Defense.
“Additionally, if there’s data that … doesn’t need to be shared, they’re identified as the person within that command to make those decisions about what needs to be shared, curated, kept,” David Markowitz, Army chief data officer and analytics officer, said in an interview.
Markowitz said the Army first put out guidance two years ago on the idea of creating “data stewards” for its commands who would act as “kind of our spokesman for our supply side,” and will start codifying it in fiscal 2024. There are already chief data officers at Army Materiel Command, 18th Airborne Corps, Army Cyber Command, Army Corps of Engineers and Army National Guard, which the service wants to support and “standardize,” Markowitz added.
“So in the Army, we’re trying to better institutionalize our data community where we’ll have both commands who understand what commands want and senior leaders want and can request data from the Army, as well as what we spent the last kind of two years doing, which is making sure we produce the data that’s needed,” Markowitz said. “Make sure [data is] standardized across and making sure there’s an interaction between those who are producing data and those who need it for their daily functions.”
Markowitz added the service is also drafting a new policy memo this month that will define the roles and responsibilities of who is in charge of the Army’s data distribution. That memo will be followed up with new guidance on what data platforms in the service “are kind of the official place to do your work within the Army.”
“We want to make sure that is codified so that if you have some places to go, you don’t necessarily build your own app and have all that cybersecurity overhead,” Markowitz said. That includes low-code and no-code safe spots for data analytics and integration.
Army Spokeswoman Madison Bonzo told Breaking Defense on Jan. 5 that the draft memo is “being updated to include command chief data officer positions” and is expected to be completed later this year.
Data management has been something the Army has struggled with and stood out to be the service’s biggest challenge during Project Convergence in November 2022, the Army’s contribution to the Pentagon’s sprawling Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control initiative.
At the time, service officials said they had too much data to work with and Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said that the service needed to figure out how to process data as quickly as it can.
Wormuth, who made turning the Army into a data-centric service a top priority, said then that the service could get additional “top down sort of guidance” from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on how to better standardize data so it’s accessible and shareable across platforms and services.
