The transportation systems across the United States collect a vast amount of data — from the roadways to the railways, as well as air traffic and anything that travels. The federal government is collecting this data to improve travel safety and efficiency for citizens nationwide.

Daniel Morgan, Chief Data Officer (CDO) at the US Department of Transportation (DOT), is the first CDO working for a cabinet agency, and he is leading the charge to make government data safe, useful and valuable. Stu Miniman (@stu) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked to Morgan at the MIT CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, MA, to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to be a government CDO.

Morgan is theCUBE’s Guest of the Week.

A new role in government

Gillin asked Morgan about the role of the CDO in government. He explained that the role is new and still being defined, but he has three areas he is working on to define how to use the data.

“My journey was a little bit different. I think everybody comes to the job a bit differently. We don’t train CDOs quite yet. I started out as a management consultant doing supply chain work, and this taught me the importance of data and analytics and truth in our data … when the opportunity presented itself to compete for the job of chief data officer at the U.S .Department of Transportation, I threw my hat in the ring. And I was fortunate enough to be selected. I am … the first chief data officer at any cabinet agency, which is kind of a unique scope, so it’s an opportunity to really shape what this can be about in the federal government.

“I break it down into three simple terms: Improve our data governance, which is really about getting the right people around the table to make decisions about what priorities we need to focus on to make our data more useful and support the agency.

“Then engagement with users. President Obama has really made open data a priority for the federal government … it’s become increasingly important because data is so fundamental to accomplishing a lot of our agency missions. So engagement with our data users also helps us understand where we need to focus our priorities in terms of where we can make technology improvements and quality improvements.

“The last piece is around technology enablement. Bringing modern 21^st century tools into the agency to get the most value from our data for the staff that we currently have.”

Balancing openness and security

Working with government data requires a great deal of security, but with a mandate to open up the data, Miniman asked Morgan how he balances both. He revealed his methodology.

“It’s a team sport, that’s the first thing. … One of the things that the “Open Data Policy” really did for us was to move the presumption to one of openness. You start with ‘this is probably releasable’ and work back from the reasons why it’s not. That might change what you release. The statistics community [has a] statistical disclosure limitation and other kinds of advanced privacy protecting techniques that still allow us to get statistics out. That’s how [we get] census data. For us to be able to know where people live and how many people live in geographical areas is important when we want to build transportation in the first place.

“Then there’s this notion of working with the chief information officer and the chief security officer to make sure our systems have the right controls in place both from an access management and then from a fundamental technological controls perspective to secure the data.”

The data mix

Gillin remarked that there are DOTs on several government levels. He asked Morgan where the US DOT fits in with local agencies. Morgan described how agencies collaborate.

“We’re a mishmash of an agency, so we’ve got the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — so if you’ve ever tracked a plane that’s our data. Flight aware, flight stats — that’s our data being used by lots of different folks.

“We have a lot of regulatory compliance data, so when you drive down the road and see inspectors pulling trucks over and doing inspections, that’s some federal workers and a lot of state workers. All of that data flows to the department for us to understand which trucking companies might be more risky than others.

“We have all of the data about vehicle recalls, which was a hot topic in the news, child safety seats, as well and other vehicle equipment. … We have a consumer protection mission, we have a public health mission, so we collect the census of fatal crashes. That’s data that begins with a law enforcement officer responding on the street and moves up through the layers of government: the city, the county, the state and ultimately to the federal government. We use that data to understand which kind of vehicle technologies would help reduce the number of fatal crashes or which kind of roadway improvements might be most effective in preventing those crashes from happening in the first place.”

Monetizing the data

Miniman asked if the government is trying to monetize the data. Morgan pointed out that with others monetizing the data, it helps to improve communities in many ways.

“Generally, we are trying to make the data open and freely available. Some state and local agencies have thought about monetizing the data. … I think that’s sort of the key — understanding that there are ancillary applications that can help communities more effectively advocate for where transportation investments need to occur. They can highlight where transportation may or may not be working for them.

“Industries can better understand where transportation issues might occur so they can site their locations more effectively and create jobs in those communities and understand how they’ll be able to serve their customers by getting goods to market. These are all interesting and novel ways to put the data to work, and I think the economic value of those outweighs some sort of cost recovery.”

Watch the full interview below to learn more about how the government is putting data to use to improve U.S. citizens lives. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

Photo by SiliconANGLE