ODI Statewide Data Strategy 2026-2027 (web)
Citation
California Office of Data and Innovation (ODI). “California Statewide Data Strategy 2026-2027.” Report web page, innovation.ca.gov, date not stated. https://innovation.ca.gov/reports/california-statewide-data-strategy-2026-2027. Copy: raw/web/2026-11-09 ODI Statewide Data Strategy 2026-2027.md (original: .html beside it). Read 2026-11-09.
Bottom line
- The State Chief Data Officer’s office in ODI must update the State Data Strategy every two years. This update sets three goals and ten objectives for 2026 to 2028.
- Its vision is a “federated, trusted data highway”. It covers data platforms, data sharing, privacy, responsible AI and the state data workforce, each objective with milestones and metrics.
Background
ODI publishes the strategy as one long web page of about 7,000 words. It follows two earlier strategy reports, from 2020 and 2024. It has an executive summary, a section on what ODI heard from agencies and the ten objectives. It ends with a table of changes from 2024, a conclusion and a list of documents reviewed. The page gives no publication date.
Key claims
- “The State Chief Data Officer’s office is established within the Office of Data and Innovation (ODI) and is required to update the State Data Strategy Report every two years and achieve its goals to advance the state’s data ecosystem.” (Executive Summary, Vision)
- “Providing expertise and platforms allows ODI to partner on projects and provide data and analytics engineering expertise or secure computing environments for sensitive data analyses.” (Objective 1)
- “Secure data enclaves for high-risk data: Promote secure data enclaves or sandboxes for analytics involving sensitive data.” (Objective 6)
- “By 2027, double the number of annual data sharing initiatives executed under IDEA from the 2024 baseline of 15 executed agreements.” (Objective 5)
- “Maximizing infrastructure: ODI will educate and train departments on unlocking AI and ML features within their current licensed platforms (e.g., Microsoft Azure, AWS, Snowflake). This ‘existing-tools-first’ approach minimizes costs and accelerates deployment by removing procurement hurdles.” (Objective 8)
- “By 2027, establish an ‘AI Accelerator’ service to support department pilots.” (Objective 8)
- “Train at least 300 employees via CalAcademy in 2026, scaling to a cumulative 3,000 by 2028.” (Objective 9)
- “Hiring and retaining qualified data professionals in government is difficult due to misaligned job classifications for data roles and intense competition with the private sector.” (What We’ve Heard, Data Workforce Gaps)
Evidence and method
A state strategy document. It sets goals, milestones and progress metrics. Its evidence for the current state is ODI’s work with “hundreds of stakeholders” over two years, given as themes with no survey data. It names the Cradle-to-Career data system and the Homeless Data Integration System as progress. It lists ten documents reviewed, among them the Connecticut, New Jersey and Washington state data plans.
Limits
The strategy covers state agency data and AI use. It does not cover research computing, universities or CalCompute. It gives no budget or staff count for any objective. The title says 2026-2027, but the text sets objectives “for 2026–2028” and milestones up to 2028. Some milestone dates, such as Data CoP charters “by early 2026”, are earlier than the date the library read the page. The page does not say whether ODI has met them.