CIO Council taps data to bolster IT workforce

The CIO Council wants to use the data from a recent survey to strengthen the federal IT hiring process.

In concert with the Obama administration’s Smarter IT initiative, Deputy Federal CIO Lisa Schlosser, who was the acting director of the council until Tony Scott was appointed federal CIO, pushed the CIO Council to research opportunities to make the federal IT workforce effective, according to a blog post on CIO.gov. The council’s Workforce Committee decided a survey of the federal IT community and federal chief human capital officers on the government’s hiring process would be most fitting.

While the council doesn’t plan to publicize the results of the survey, it aims to act on the data and go beyond the typical conversations on attracting talented IT leaders.

“In the digital age in which we live, there are few reasons why anyone should act before collecting and analyzing data,” Richard McKinney, Transportation Department CIO and co-chair of the Workforce Committee, said in a statement. “The tools are there, and they’re easy to use.”

This survey represents a chance to move beyond anecdotes to more actionable data points, Craig Jennings, a senior adviser to the CIO Council, said in an emailed statement.

“The goal of the survey was to allow the Committee finer-grained resolution of the kinds of hiring issues faced by CIOs and IT managers,” Jennings said. “The questions were designed to allow the committee and the Council to ask more questions of the IT community and of human capital.”

Despite the council’s data-heavy focus on IT workforce reform, data won’t solve all of the problems, Jennings said.

“Data will not allow us to instantly fix problems, but it does illuminate areas of interest, allowing the committee to focus its available resources,” he said. “Human capital issues can be seemingly monumental, but the committee’s use of available data will allow it to zero in on certain areas to be addressed in manageable scopes.”

The data generated from the survey will be compiled with other federal workforce data sets, like the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, to help the CIO Council grow and maintain a stronger IT workforce.