ALC-Data-Sharing and Data-Driven Decision-Making Subcommittee
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- October 7, 2026
Senator Jane English
Unverified
0:00
everybody. Let me see who is on here this morning. Can you identify yourselves, please? Mark
Senator Jane English
Unverified
0:12
got two minutes, Mark. Oh, okay. The clock in here says 11, but it's not quite. Well, that's house time, 151. Is
Speaker 6
0:21
that on your end or aria that on your end okay yeah
Speaker 7
0:30
that's house time two minutes ahead of the senate
Senator Jane English
Unverified
0:32
um i don't know who's on the call here but um hopefully most of you have been able to join us We have no minutes to have to approve. But I do want to make a little announcement here, which I think is really very important,
is that our Little Rock, Adita Kerkera, Deputy Chief Data Officer at TSS Division of Information Systems, was selected as the Data Leader of the Year in the 2020 Women in IT Awards in New York, October the 29th. The awards recognize women in organizations who are breaking digital boundaries and championing change for women in technology. She received the award from a field of nine other women selected to the shortlist for the award.
Representing the state of Arkansas, Attita was the only nominee from the public sector. Other award candidates on the short list represented organizations such as Etsy, NASDAQ, Rolls-Royce, Behringer, Pharmaceuticals, Bloomberg, BlackRock, Emphasis, Poshmark, and SP Global. So I think that she has done very well and has competed quite well in a universe of
very, very professional women. So I congratulate her, and it's a benefit to the Department of Information Systems, but it's also a benefit to the state of Arkansas. These kinds of things are very important. So thank you. Mark, do you have any comments? I don't. I'm sorry I'm not
Speaker 6
2:32
with you this morning. I had misunderstood the instructions. I'll have to read
Speaker 14
2:37
instructions a lot better, but I'm glad I could join you by Zoom.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:43
Good. Okay, I see Lance Eads has joined us. Good morning, Lance. Glad to have you here. Anybody else coming on? Good morning. Thank you. Good. Glad to have you here. Okay, we'll move right into, we have an update from the Chief Data Officer and Data Transparency Panel, Josh McGee. He is the Chief Data Officer, and he's going to make a presentation here on what they're doing, where they are. and i think good information for all of us good morning josh
Speaker 20
3:17
hello can you guys hear me yes yes great um so thank you senator english uh you cut out there at the end i assume that you introduced
Speaker 24
3:43
me and are ready for me to go. I am. Fantastic. So I'm going to provide a brief update on the Chief Data Officer's Office's progress on the tasks that you've given us,
as well as our current priorities here in the coming two-year period. Of course, this work is done in conjunction with Adita, who I would like to congratulate as well on her recent award, as well as Robert Magoo, who is the other deputy state chief data officer. All right. So just a quick review of the history. So the legislature initiated the data-driven decision-making effort back in 2017 with Act 912.
In the three years since the passage of that bill, we have made significant progress, and I expect us to demonstrate a big leap forward over the next two years. This slide shows the various tasks that are established in law for the data and transparency panel. You'll notice that the first three of these duties involve planning and feasibility studies while the bottom four involve execution. I'm happy to be able to report that we've completed the first three of these duties and we're moving from planning to actual execution. We're moving
from the planning phase to actually doing real world stuff that will help the state of Arkansas. Today, we're going to review our current priorities in a number of areas, including data sharing and governance, statewide longitudinal data system, and then we're going to talk a bit about my vision for the future of the CDO's office, as well as the overall effort. All right. First, we're going to talk about Arkansas data sharing agreement. So a data sharing agreement is a legal document that lays out all the roles and responsibilities
around data sharing. This document must be signed by parties before data can be transferred and before any data-driven decision-making products are produced. Right now, our current DSA process is ad hoc, it's inefficient, and it's very time-consuming. And what that means is it's very hard to share data quickly, and that limits the number of projects that we can take on and the amount of data that is shared between departments. So we're developing an enterprise
data sharing agreement, which will standardize the language for DSAs and hopefully create a more efficient process facilitating more data sharing amongst various state departments. This framework has been reviewed by the governance committee of the DTP and we plan to roll it out to the full DTP next week and begin working with state departments to finalize and put in place for the state. Next we're going
Speaker 25
6:27
to talk about the citizens data portal. So data sharing is important between
Speaker 24
6:34
departments, but it's also very important to be able to share data that we can share publicly with the citizens of Arkansas to increase both transparency and accountability. The state currently makes financial data available through transparency.arkansas, and various departments have their own data sites, but there's not a one-stop shop for citizens to look up governmental data on performance, on financials, on demographics. We'd like to create a one-stop shop for the citizens of Arkansas to be able to access publicly available data from the state.
Many other states have these types of sites, and we've highlighted here with some links some of the states that do it very well. I would encourage you all to check out those links, see what's possible out there, and provide any feedback you might have for us. We're currently in the process of evaluating solutions for the state of Arkansas, and we'll move quickly to try to secure funding for a citizen's data portal. Next, we're going to talk
about the data and transparency panel. This is a panel made up of representatives from various state departments that helps craft data sharing policy for the state. However, the DTP does not currently have membership from all 15 state departments. Six departments, including agriculture, energy, and environment, parks, heritage, and tourism are not represented. So some key state departments are not represented. We'd like to expand that DTP membership
here relatively quickly. Membership in the DTP is established in state law, so that would require a legislative change. We've also been working to establish as part of the overall DTP effort to establish agency data officers in each department. The reason for doing this is because it creates a single point of communication inside state departments around data sharing and facilitates a much more efficient conversation.
Once the DTP, if the DTP is expanded, we would work to establish agency data officers in the new members of the DTP. All right, so transitioning to talking about the state longitudinal data system and some of our data projects. We've been working diligently to connect education programs to workforce outcomes. We've been working with both ADE and the Department of Higher Education, as well as the Division
of Workforce Services to bring into the state longitudinal data system workforce data and higher education data. information connecting higher education data to workforce outcomes, education programs to workforce outcomes, is available in static PDF reports that are very long and are not very user-friendly. We are working diligently to create more dynamic products that are tailored to the needs of various stakeholders to present this information in a way that would be much more
decision-ready and would help inform decision-making in a more real-time way. We provided a couple of links here for state products that do a very similar thing to what we're trying to do. The first one is from Illinois, and this provides information to consumers, so folks who are trying to figure out what their pathway through higher education should be to deliver the workforce outcome that they want. It's very user friendly. It's a very interesting product. Senator English,
I think you in particular would be very interested in seeing this. You've talked a lot about trying to connect this information to consumers in a way that they can digest and actually use in their everyday life. I think the Illinois example is a great one. The second link there is from Ohio. Ohio has a deep collaboration with Ohio State University and together they have produced several dashboards. If you go to that link, you'll see the first two dashboards are around workforce programs. The first is for workforce success measures, so tracking workforce outcomes
in the state of Ohio. The second is more information about jobs and industry availability in the state to help inform both state policy, but also consumers who are trying to navigate challenging workforce environments. In the state of Arkansas, we are working also with DWS to enhance the tools available both to employers and to job seekers to better connect folks who
have been displaced by COVID-19 with jobs that are available and reskilling programs as needed. I know that we've come before you a few times and have talked about the connection between education data and workforce data. That is our current priority is connecting those data sets and producing some data products that are useful from that data integration. However, that's not the extent of our ambition here. We expect to be able to expand pretty quickly to
other data sets in the state of Arkansas, bring those data sets into the SLDS, integrate them with current data, and then be able to use those data for insights. Two of our initial priorities once we have the workforce and education data in-house is to expand to provide workforce outcomes for career and technical education concentrators, and then also work with corrections to provide workforce outcomes for some of their educational programs. Other data priorities will
include pre-K through 12th grade data, adult education, labor and licensing, rehabilitation programs. Really, we're looking to expand the state longitudinal data system with data that will allow us to produce products that will be useful to the state of Arkansas. So we are looking to you, we're looking to state departments to identify those priority areas and help us know where those high value targets are to expand the SLDS. In addition to working internally in the
state of Arkansas, we are also actively participating in multi-state groups to solve common problems, and learn about innovative data-driven products and initiatives. Some examples of that would be our work with the Cooleridge Initiative, with the State Chief Data Officers Network, and Results for America. These allow us to kind of get outside our own state borders and see the cool stuff that other states are doing, and hopefully port some of that over to our states. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening out in the world, and we want
Speaker 26
13:48
Arkansas to be able to take advantage of
Speaker 29
13:55
everything that we see out in other states. All right, transitioning to
Speaker 24
14:01
a vision for the future, for the CDO's office, for the data-driven decision-making effort. So in my mind, data-driven decision-making requires three primary things, a high-functioning state longitudinal data system with efficient data governance. You need the infrastructure to bring state data together and use it for good.
Two, you need the analytic capacity to actually use the data to produce actionable insights. Data in and of itself, integrating data in and of itself won't make a difference. We need the capacity to actually turn that data into something that we can use in decision making, and that requires human analytic capacity. And three, we need a process to work with the legislature and state departments to identify high-priority problems in issue areas and then work continuously over time to generate improvements in those areas.
Data-driven decision-making is not a one-time thing. It's not about bringing data together to answer a single question. It's about continuous improvement in high-priority areas. We're working to build all three of these in Arkansas. We've made a lot of progress on number one, and now we're transitioning to focus on the analytic capacity and a process for identifying priorities. So speaking of analytic capacity, in the long term, the CDO's office will have two
primary parts. It's going to have the technical infrastructure and staff housed within DIS to bring data together, integrate data, and govern and manage that data efficiently and securely. We'll also have the CDO and policy-focused staff operating within the TSS Secretary's Office to focus more on the high-level policy and the process for identifying high-priority areas and executing projects to help us improve in those areas. Our strategy for building the state's
analytic capacity, which is a key element of this, is threefold. We expect to build a small analytics team within state government that will help us develop internal products that can help with operations and insights. We will work with state departments and divisions to develop their own analytic capacity. So we'll have a centralized resource. We also plan to work with state departments to help them develop their own internal resources. But third, and I think this is a big one, and this is an area where other states are ahead of us, we plan to collaborate with the
university system and leverage existing subject matter expertise to help us go further than we could just relying on internal state resources. Transitioning to the third element of data-driven decision-making, a process for continuous improvement. You can see the cycle that I've got here, I think this is very, very important. Our goal is to make the state more efficient and effective using data. We currently work to address problems in a somewhat ad hoc and sporadic
fashion. We tend to focus on whatever is making noise, and we often don't think very far in the future, so we have very short timelines and don't really work to continuously improve in areas. But data-driven decision-making requires that we develop a more continuous and routine process for using data to improve, and that's what we're going to try to do. And so that is kind of the final step in building our capacity internally is working with the legislature and state departments to develop that process to help us focus on issues across multiple years.
Thank you very much. All right. With that, I'll wrap it up and take questions. You can see that I've included my, Adita, and Robert's contact information here. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions after this meeting or are just interested in following up around data-driven
Senator Jane English
Unverified
17:56
decision-making. I think this is very interesting. I think, you know, for most of us, we've just spent a month or more going through the budgeting process. And most of us, I'd count myself at the top of this list, look at all these programs and all this money.
hello yes are you there mark are you there mark yes i can hear you um but we absolutely have no idea what what all those dollars mean you're
Speaker 38
18:38
still muted this is representative lowry can you hear
Speaker 6
18:41
me yeah yes uh josh i had a question i saw in there
uh looking towards the future uh one of the areas on data uh data privacy and data sharing was K-12 education, and I had mentioned to Senator English some time back that I introduced legislation, I think, back in the 2015 session about privacy of student data, and I had never gotten so much pushback from state agencies and other entities of concern
about that. How would we assure the privacy of student data if we're going to be, especially at K-12, since these students are minors and they have, there are privacy concerns there? Yep, and that's a
Speaker 20
19:39
great question. You know, of course, with
Speaker 24
19:42
a lot of our data, we have federal legislation that protects individuals' privacy. So there's FERPA that protects K-12 students and there's HIPAA that protects health data, we would abide by all that legislation
protecting privacy. The data would be stored in a secured way. Individual student level data would not be provided externally at all. It would be used internally. And so there is no real danger of violating privacy by bringing those data together and integrating them. And then when it comes to actually developing research products or products for the public, we would abide by FERPA and the guidelines that are set out by our own Department of
Senator Jane English
Unverified
20:31
Education before releasing any data publicly. Okay. Thank you. Do I have
Speaker 43
20:45
any other questions? senator eaves or senator hammer you got some questions and and josh let me uh let
Speaker 6
20:51
me follow up with you i i would like to work with you uh in in possibly crap crafting some legislation in the next session that would assure that privacy uh i know as i said there was a lot of pushback
I was even had a representative, I guess a lobbyist for one of the yearbook companies that got with me and said, oh representative, we need access to this information to be able to market our yearbooks and all of that and so at that point I pulled the legislation down but I really would like to move forward with that again so I appreciate your input I would be happy
Speaker 20
21:30
to talk with you about that, Representative.
Speaker 24
21:33
You know, especially on K-12 education, many other states integrate those data for kind of policy research. And so the privacy issues around K-12 education are well understood and manageable and have a long track record of
Speaker 6
21:55
success. Okay. And one last follow-up. I understand several years back there was conversation about tracking the effectiveness of pre-K programs.
And the only research that we had access to was information that was not Arkansas-centric. It was looking at studies in other states that said that even quality pre-K programs, the effectiveness of it faded by the fourth grade. And there seemed to be some type of a bottleneck of being able to access that Arkansas-centric information. Is this the kind of research that you're talking about that would be internal, but it also could be used for policy development?
Speaker 24
22:44
Yes, exactly right. So whenever I talk about a process for identifying high-priority areas where we want to use data to improve, this is a great example of that. We would love to work with you and the Department of Education to figure out the best way to evaluate the quality of pre-K programs. I think that is a fantastic example of a policy area where more research is needed, more Arkansas-centric research is needed, and where just a little more information would help decision makers be a lot more informed.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
23:18
Great. Thank you very much. so do we have any other other questions any other comments at all so i think one of the things that we probably all as legislators are going to have to think start thinking about is what kind of information do we need we've just sort of let it all come to us but but i think we have an obligation for oversight purposes to really begin to look at what kinds of information do we need
that they can help us with that will make us help us make better decisions I'm not saying all decisions we make are bad but
we might be able to make better decisions policy decisions if we have
Speaker 20
24:09
some different information and Senator English
Speaker 24
24:11
that is I would I would welcome that input from the legislature. I think that it's very important for us to highlight issues where
the legislature has interest and where you would like more information to improve future decision making. I think highlighting those early and allowing us to bring information to bear and help inform that decision-making process is exactly the goal that
Speaker 20
24:35
we're aiming for. good anybody else have
Senator Jane English
Unverified
24:38
any more questions here anything else they'd like to contribute well i appreciate
you all being on here thank you josh for the update and we appreciate uh all the
work you're doing and we will continue to work with you and hope there are probably some things that we can help you with during the legislative session that will make your job a little easier So we will work with you on those things as we move along here. But thank you very much, everybody, for being on here. And I will call the meeting to a close.
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