It is unusual to find someone with twenty years of experience in the U.S. Army culminating in a position as the Chief Data Officer of the United States Army Futures Command. However, even rarer to find a person with a PhD. in systems engineering and multiple awards for systems engineering achievement. Yet, we did.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Portia Crowe, Chief Data Strategist, Defense, and Applied Intelligence Accenture Federal Services. We are going to try to take that mountain of experience and distill it into a thirty-minute interview. The discussion focused on federal data strategy and best practices to achieve digital transformation in the federal government.

Dr. Crowe’s challenges have not been insignificant – she had to work in environments where bandwidth is severely limited, even without communications. As a result, her lessons are even more applicable in a federal environment where cloud capabilities and high-speed Internet abound.