The State Department recently hired Matthew Graviss—a Ph.D. systems engineer with years of experience in multiple senior Homeland Security Department roles—as its first-ever permanent chief data officer.
Graviss reports to Janice deGarmo, who served as the deputy director of State’s Office of Management Strategy and Solutions, or M/SS, from mid-2018 until December, when the department promoted her to be M/SS’ director. deGarmo simultaneously filled in as the agency’s first acting CDO since summer 2019, shortly after the position was federally mandated by the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act. She spent many months on the search for State’s first fully-focused CDO.
“I think [Graviss] really exudes all of the qualities we were looking for in a CDO to be effective here,” deGarmo said during an interview last week. “But I think one of the ones that is certainly top of mind for me where he stood out is he really wants to enable the workforce to use data to solve problems and glean insights to advance the mission.”
She and Graviss briefed Nextgov on their collective vision to further arm employees across the enterprise with new tools and policies to fully harness the department’s vast repositories of data.
To fill the now-required CDO role, the department conducted what deGarmo deemed a “long recruitment process” that unfolded for a chunk of the year. “It was long because there was so much interest and we really wanted to walk through it very carefully,” she explained. “And what really surfaced in almost every interview that we had for the CDO position was generally the mission focus and sheer excitement of applicants to make an impact in the foreign policy arena with data … it was really nice to see that.”
And Graviss was o ..
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