Ask The Cio

Dr. David Markowitz, the Army’s chief data officer, said a streamlined and unified approach to the data platforms the service uses will enable senior leaders to make better, faster decisions.

Chris DeRusha, the federal chief information security officer, said the focus on securing commercial software comes from the cyber executive order.

The Defense Logistics Agency reached a major milestone on its cloud journey.  It recently completed the migration of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the cloud.

More than 100 agencies have signed on to extend their current set of telecommunications contracts for an additional year. The General Services Administration gave agencies until Sept. 30 to sign a memorandum of understanding to keep using the Networx and other programs while they transition to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions or EIS program. Gary Washington, USDA’s chief information officer, said at a recent ACT-IAC webinar, while the transition is important, the focus is on ensuring USDA delivers better services to their customers and stakeholders and getting that right may make the transition to EIS take a little longer. He was joined by Allen Hill, the now former deputy assistant commissioner in the Office of IT Category at the General Services Administration; Jeff Flick, the deputy director for Service Delivery Division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and David Naugle, a senior IT specialist at the Social Security Administration. The panel was moderated by Federal News Net

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has a better understanding of where it’s cybersecurity shortcoming lie. To be clear, NGA recently passed several key audits required for its unclassified systems. But Gary Buchanan, the chief information security officer at NGA, said at a recent AFCEA DC panel these audits are actually helping the agency better protect their data and networks instead of just pointing out problems. He was joined by David McKeown, the deputy CISO at the Defense Department and Angel Phaneuf, the CISO for the Army Software Factory. The panel was moderated by Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency is trying to lighten the ever-increasing load of policy mandates, laws and cyber threats agencies must deal with every day. From the zero trust strategy to the cybersecurity executive order, to the vulnerabilities like Log4j and the latest on five different VMware products, agency chief information security officers probably feel like they are swimming upstream most of the time. But after almost a decade of work, the continuous diagnostic and mitigation (CDM) program from CISA is providing more data, more analysis and more general and specific knowledge. Richard Grabowski, the acting program manager of the CDM program at CISA, joined Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO to talk more.

Only in the last year has the 2019 Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act started to demonstrate a real impact on agency missions. As agencies updated their strategic plans for 2022, many used the law to drive better cross-agency conversations. For more, David Walters, the chief of strategic planning, performance management and reporting branch at the NASA Johnson Space Center; Harry Knight, the executive director for China and former director of the Office of Performance Evaluation at the Commerce Department; and Jeff Yefsky, the CEO of the Performance Institute spoke to Executive Editor Jason Miller at a recent panel on this week's Ask the CIO.

As the number of data centers continue to shrink year after year, agencies must make the hard decision about how best to optimize the remaining on-premise facilities. With another 54 planned closures in the final months of fiscal 2022, the 1,500 or so remaining are primed to advance their use of energy metering tools, server virtualization technologies and approaches to decrease the number of servers and increase the utilization of those that do remain. Tom Santucci, director of IT modernization within the General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, and Steven Naumann, a senior advisor in Office of IT modernization within OGP, spoke to Executive Editor Jason Miller on Ask the CIO more about it.

Where are all your assets on your network? That is the first question agency chief information security officers may want to ask on their journey toward a zero trust architecture. Shane Barney, the chief information security officer at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Homeland Security Department spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

When Keith Jones joined the State Department as its chief information officer in January 2021, he was surprised by the bureaucracy. Jones spent his entire federal career in working for the Justice Department or the Homeland Security Department and thought he’d knew how the system worked. Jones, who recently left after 17 months as the CIO of the State Department, said he tried cut through the bureaucracy to deal with some long standing cultural challenges. He joined Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

The Baltimore Ravens football team may be better known for its winning ways on the field and its rabid fans in the stands. But the Social Security Administration turned to the NFL team because of its prowess in using data to drive customer experience decisions. It also didn’t hurt that SSA headquarters is located in Baltimore County, Maryland, and many of the staff are big fans of the team. Patrick Newbold, the assistant deputy commissioner and deputy chief information officer at SSA, said the Ravens are known for providing a great customer experience for their fans so it just made sense that the agency would reach out. He spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

The Defense Department has been talking about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) standards for more than three years. And while the final version 2.0 standards aren’t going to be ready until next summer, the impact of just talking about improving cybersecurity among contractors is real. Stacy Bostjanick, the chief of implementation and policy and deputy CIO for cybersecurity for the Defense Department and Dr. Kelly Fletcher, the principal deputy chief information officer for the Defense Department spoke about this at the recent AFCEA NOVA Small Business IT Day.

The House of Representatives Chief Administrative Office is close to adding another shared service to the 100 or so it already provides. These range from acquisition support to human resources to finance and logistics. But the one area where those services were missing and sorely needed was around digital transformation. So in the coming months, the CAO will launch its new digital services office. Catherine Szpindor, the House of Representatives chief administrative officer and Alan Thompson, the House’s chief information officer spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

The impact of the Defense Innovation Unit shouldn’t be measured in the number of agreements awarded or the amount of dollars obligated. Both, by the way, are breaking new records each year. Rather, the impact of DIU should be measured in number of problems it helps solve for the Defense Department. Mike Madsen, the deputy director of Defense Innovation Unit, spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

For FEMA, cloud services are a lifeline to disaster survivors. There may be no better uses cases than when a hurricane or tornado strikes and FEMA must scale up its grants management or flood insurance program to tens of thousands of users in a matter of hours. Lytwaive Hutchinson, FEMA chief information officer; Greg Edwards, FEMA chief information security officer; Kevin Long, the insurance systems branch chief and Alonna Barnhart, a senior technical adviser spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

For the last few years, the IRS has been changing its external reputation and internal culture of an agency that doesn’t take technology risks. The Pilot IRS program may be one of the most well-known examples of this external evolution, reaching out to vendors to bring in innovation and new approaches to contracting. Internally, the use of robotics process automation in the procurement and financial offices has been a strong influence on the workforce’s culture. Shanna Webbers, the assistant deputy commissioner for operations support at the IRS, and Chief Financial Officer Teresa Hunter, spoke to Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

Before Maria Roat retired at the end of March, she made sure one important initiative was well on its way. The former deputy federal chief information officer said the effort to create shared calendar and collaboration tools across all agencies is on the right track. The next federal deputy CIO needs not only to pick up this collaboration initiative and others, including modernizing the IT workforce, but also establish strong connections and understandings on the budget side and with agency CIOs. Roat joined Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on this week's Ask the CIO.

Don’t call the $10.5 million infusion of funding the Department of Veterans Affairs received to modernize its identity management platform an "award" or a "loan." Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana prefers to call it an "investment" by the Technology Modernization Fund Board. She and TMF Director Raylene Yung joined Jason Miller on Ask the CIO to discuss more.

When the Defense Information Systems Agency decided to end its milCloud offering, it didn’t mean the end of on-premise cloud options for its Defense customers. DISA is replacing that long-time, possibly underutilized offering with something new called Stratus. Sharon Woods, the director of Hosting and Compute Center at DISA spoke about how Stratus works with Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on Ask the CIO.

The federal government will finally pull the plug on the use of Dun and Bradstreet numbers and fully move to a brand new identifier for contractors, called the unique entity identifier (UEI). On April 4, GSA will complete a major technology modernization project that started in 2012, picked up steam in 2016 and finally will come to completion after a six-month parallel test. Memi Whitehead, the deputy assistant commissioner of GSA’s Integrated Award Environment, spoke about the shift with Federal News Network Executive Editor Jason Miller on Ask the CIO.