(Oceania) Tracy Parsons, Chief Data Officer, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand, speaks with Maria Espona, Editorial Board Member, CDO Magazine, about data capabilities and the need to upskill talent to use data effectively.

A part of Parsons’ role is to build data capability and skills across the ministry. She mentions her important achievements as generating conversations about data and information within the ministry.

Parsons and her team began by taking stock of skills and the number of data analysts in the ministry. A detailed data capability survey revealed a significant skill gap and it was used to inform a business case and hire a new team. She reveals that the survey is now conducted once a year to measure the skills and the growth of the data analysts across the ministry. 

The training offerings now include three to four different initiatives. There is a data community that supports participants with content and resources. Then data analysts can take up a course and exercises to learn and upskill themselves. Data stewards have a separate training program. And lastly, senior managers in the ministry participate in regular executive briefs to understand how data can support them.

Parsons says that while there are more plans on these lines, a focus area is to upskill foreign policy staff and diplomats to use data in their day-to-day work. 

Since she started in August 2018 an important milestone for Parson was to get people more engaged in conversations around data. This mainly because most of the ministry’s manpower hasn’t been exposed to the benefits of data was as the ministry had been the only place they had worked post their education.