Shenzhen will pilot to set up chief data officers (CDOs) in a number of designated government agencies in its latest push to expedite the construction of a smart city and digital government.
The municipal government, Futian, Nanshan, Bao’an and Pingshan district governments, and eight city-level bureaus, including the public security bureau, human resources bureau and the meteorological observatory, will have these posts, according to an action plan made public at the city government’s official website earlier this week.
CDOs, first appearing in large companies in the early 200os to address the pressures of digital information, work to oversee data collection, management and storage across an organization. They are responsible for analyzing and deriving insights from data to help with business strategy and value, ensuring that the department is functioning to enable internal efficiency through improved data structures.
In Shenzhen, their major responsibility is to promote smart city and digital government construction, improve data standardization management and data integration, innovation and application, implement regular guidance and supervision, and help build data talent pool.
According to the plan, the city’s new CDO system will be an innovative and systematic measure to promote market-based allocation of data factor reforms.
This May, Guangdong listed Shenzhen as one of its 10 cities to pilot the CDO system and has tasked the city to explore a replicable and generalizable practice in this respect.
“The chief data officer mechanism serves the city’s smart city construction,” said Li Enhan of the Postdoctorate Work Station of China Development Institute, a think tank based in Shenzhen.
CDOs will help break the data silo between different departments and realize effective application of government data in public services and urban governance, according to Li.
The city’s legislature passed data legislation this June, outlining provisions for the management and free sharing of public data, as well as new mechanisms for data trading in efforts to create a fairer playing field in the highly under-regulated data trading market.
The new regulation will be in force from Jan. 1, 2022.
Shenzhen has been tasked to play an exemplary and leading role in digital government construction, according to Guangdong Province’s first five-year plan on the reform and construction of e-government released in July.