#134 Empowering Virginians with Trusted Data with Carlos Rivero - Chief Data Officer
In the 6th episode of our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series, we have Carlos Rivero, Chief Data Officer at Commonwealth of Virginia.
Carlos started college wanting to become a civil engineer to help with his father’s business, but later on gravitated towards environmental engineering and ecology given that he lived in Miami and was a witness to the environmental impact on their local marine ecology. Thanks to the advice of one of his professors and mentor, he chose science over engineering.
While an undergraduate student, he was also working at the University of Miami and that’s when he started getting into collecting data, analyzing it, coming up with hypotheses and testing them. After his graduation, they asked him to figure out how to operate a GIS system for a project they had going on in Tampa Bay, Florida. That ended up being his first data integration project and it became clear for him that he loved working with data.
For Carlos, it’s very important to bring people together and have them understand the value of the work they are doing, why they’re doing it and the impact it can have on real world issues.
Stay tuned to learn more about his career, how he became Commonwealth of Virginia’s Chief Data Officer and everything he learned on the way.
Enjoy Carlos Rivero in our “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series!
We speak about:
[0:15] How did you get started in the world of data?
[4:13] When did you work in that first data integration project?
[6:05] How did you end up being the Chief Data Officer at Commonwealth of Virginia?
[13:30] How did you develop the strength of bringing people together?
[19:30] Do you have any tips for people?
Resources:
Carlos’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-rivero-57542859/
Commonwealth of Virginia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/commonwealth-of-virginia/about/
Quotes:
"Take money out of the equation and simply focus on what brings you fulfillment and happiness."
"It became clear to me that I loved working with data and being able to tell stories from those data assets that I was working with."
"One of the basic things that I really enjoyed about those projects was being of service, because it was not just geographic information science that I was working on, it was really at the service of something larger than that, of something that had potential impact in our social sphere and that to me was extraordinarily appealing and that was a big driver for the impact these projects had on my career."
"Being in environments where you can work across multiple agencies with other scientists and bring data assets together to work on larger scale problems really demonstrates the value of the synergy of bringing your data assets together and making collective, holistic views of what’s happening in the real world. At the end of the day, data is a binary representation of what’s happening in the real world."
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