What We're Reading: A Compendium of Tidbits on Tech

Techwire publishes daily, and on our way to finding areas of interest for you to read about, we read a lot of content. Many of the articles we read influence our coverage but don’t necessarily fit into the Techwire model.

Here are some of the pieces we thought you would find interesting:

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Early on, when most chief data officers were in large financial institutions, their most common roles were defense-oriented, involving the security, privacy, quality and regulatory compliance of key data. Today, CDOs are often found in public agencies as well as in the private sector, and they typically have multiple objectives. But often there is little consensus about which are most important. Harvard Business Review poses the question: Are You Asking Too Much of Your Chief Data Officer?

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Tech industry insiders know something about their colleagues, their associates, their clients and their targets. Savvy vendors know, for instance, that Jon Walton, chief information officer of San Mateo County, loves cars — especially ones that go fast. To learn more about Walton’s insights into the future of tech, give a listen to this podcast from Silicon Valley Insider.

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The private sector is recruiting technology workers before they graduate from college, before they attend college or even earlier. The public sector, meanwhile, is facing multiple challenges: a wave of IT retirements, an inability to compete with private-sector salaries, and a challenge in many young people’s perception of what it’s like to work in government. For answers to How to Get and Keep Next-Generation IT Talent in Government, check out this piece co-written by Teri Takai and Phil Bertolini, who together lead the Center for Digital Government*.

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If you work in IT and you like innovation, you’ll want to keep up with the Alpha project, the state’s bleeding-edge skunkworks. It’s a small, handpicked team of techies from a variety of disciplines are working to revolutionize the way the state stands up and iterates websites and other projects. But Alpha is about much more than just a website; it’s also about transparency. To that end, the team publishes regular updates of what they’re working on. The most recent diary-like entries, for example, include “Shipped Release 2 with several new stories, translated into 3 languages,” and “Thanks to Chad, we now have a great end-to-end testing suite that covers every page on our site.” It’s fun to follow along.

 

*The Center for Digital Government is a division of e.Republic, Techwire's parent company.