Creating a culture of innovation is essential to government success, according to both Federal and state government officials. During a recent GovLoop webinar, Carlos Rivero, chief data officer for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Jason Barke, acting principal deputy associate director for employee services at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), explained that a culture of innovation has to begin with a leadership mindset change to both encourage innovation and reduce the fear of failure.

The Commonwealth of Virginia’s cloud-based data sharing platform is pulling double duty in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to its original purpose combating the opioid crisis, the state’s chief data office said July 9 during a webinar hosted by AWS and MeriTalk.