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.

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

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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.

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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 Network Executive Editor Jason Miller.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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