John Walsh, Chief Data Officer at the Dept of National Defense Canada 🇨🇦
John Walsh is passionate about data storytelling and leveraging data to solve business problems and to improve decisions and services. Prior to his current role with the Department of National Defense Canada as CDO, Director General, Data Analytics, Strategy & Innovation, He was named the first Chief Data Officer (CDO) of Environment Canada and Climate Change in March 2018. Environment Canada and Climate Change is a national science-based department with over 5000 employees and the lead department mandated to protect the environment. In his first year as CDO, John stood up the office and developed and executed a department-wide three-year Data and Analytics Strategy, one of the first department strategies within the Government of Canada. Under his leadership, current CDO priorities focus on data governance renewal, data analytics as a service, data awareness and literacy, managing data as an asset, and data integration.
What is your day-to-day like and is there anything exciting you are working on?
My day-to-day is like lots of people’s day-to-day, lots of FaceTime and meetings on Zoom and Teams. In terms of the data space, I would say there are two main things ongoing for me.
One is finding data talent. There is an enormous appetite for data talent within the Department of National Defense Canadian Armed Forces (DND CAF) and really across government, so I am in the process of constantly recruiting top-tier data talent within the CDO’s office. I have daily conversations with potential talent and my HR folks, but also to retain talent with ways in which we can support our people, so they can grow in their own data space.
Secondly, I spend a lot of my time helping advance our data priorities. This includes our several dozen use cases that we’re trying to prioritize. Some examples of this are advancing data governance frameworks within DND CAF, (which is a top priority), data management, data quality, data architecture, so we’re pushing out those kinds of foundational data management projects.
How has the pandemic impacted your work?
I would say it’s been good and bad. In one sense, it’s good, as it has allowed a lot more flexibility in terms of people’s ability to work from home. I think people are generally happy to work from home. It’s helped us recruit from outside of the national capital region. Now we have people working for the team from different parts of Canada. Before the lockdown that wasn’t really something, we did a lot of.
Digital technology and digital tools have vastly improved, so that’s been hugely important to enable us to communicate. I think everyone’s feeling really encouraged by that. And it’s also increased the focus on digital capabilities and data capabilities, which previously wasn’t where it is now. There’s a heightened level of awareness.
What top trends are you noticing right now in your industry and what is going to be big in 2021?
Like I touched on above, I think there’s heightened awareness around the importance of enabling digital and data. I’m hearing senior leaders talk about things like data standards, which two years ago, I would never have heard.
I think there’s an increased awareness and increased recognition of the importance of investing in this space over the importance of enabling features that this provides as a service to Canadians and that is something that can’t be ignored.
What is your biggest data management challenge right now?
My biggest data management challenge right now is building the foundation and importance of data management within DND CAF and increasing the understanding and the importance of data management and architecture to enable data. I think the heavy lifting that has to happen is not yet well known.
That’s going to be one of the major challenges, when we push out data governance frameworks and we require our partners within the department to put in place data governance and identify data stewards and deal with terrible data quality and data access. I think data management challenges, like setting up the frameworks and the standards, is going to be a big job, we have lots of divisions between the military and corporate sides and there is an enormous amount of data. We can’t manage all the data in the same way. We’re going to have to make some choices and that’s where we need to bring our data management conversations and frameworks.
Is there anything preventing you from fully utilizing DND data?
I often see it as, if you want to leverage your data for insights, you have to do data differently. Like most organizations, we have an ocean of data, so the usual suspects prevent us from utilizing all our data the right way. The data that’s stranded and isolated across the organization is like that because of the ways in which we’ve been governing our data from the start. For that to change requires a fundamental shift in culture.
What do you think of the current state of governance and ethics when it comes to AI and ML?
On the ethics side, I would say the government of Canada has already declared itself from a policy point of view around the need for the ethical use of AI. The ways in which it’s implemented are less clear and that’s why I think the technology is always ahead of the policy. The policy needs to catch up to the technology and it’s still not caught up.
How will emerging tech play a key role in the development and evolution of the DND CAF’s data?
There’s the need for data fabrics in terms of supporting interoperability and in terms of sharing data in various clouds. There’s an enormous opportunity, an enormous thirst, to do things to data differently within the military space. In the past, we built customized solutions for customized capabilities. I think there’s a recognition that we have to move away from that and we have to build interoperability and integration at the front end.
That means that the architecture, data standards, cloud technology, and potentially data fabrics can demonstrate other ways of integrating shared data. I think the recognition of the importance of building the data backbone at the front end drives us to certain technological options.
