The Department of Education lost two top technology executives this week. The Department of Health and Human Services has fulfilled three key technology roles. And the Office of Personnel Management quickly named a new permanent chief information officer.
These are just some of the big personnel changes in the federal IT community. And that’s without counting the dozen CIOs who are leaving this week at the end of their political mandates.
Let’s start with the changes to the Department of Education. This may be due to the time of year. New year, new beginning. These may be executives looking for new opportunities, with all the threats of the Department of Education being “shut down” by the new administration. Or, it may be a new CIO wanting his own employees to occupy key positions. Thomas Flagg arrived at Education in October. Or maybe there’s something else going on that we’re not aware of.
Whatever the reason, Education has two big gaps to fill with Steven Hernandez, the agency’s chief information security officer, joining the U.S. Agency for International Development to become its deputy CIO and the CISO. And Brian Bordelon, deputy CIO for education, is joining the Commerce Department to become chief technology officer and deputy CIO.
Hernandez, who is also vice chair of the CISO Council, joins his former boss Jason Gray, the USAID CIO, who served as the education sector’s top technology executive for more than six years. Gray joins USAID in August 2022.
“While I am excited about this next chapter, it is bittersweet to leave a team that I hold in such high regard,” Hernandez wrote in an email to staff, obtained by Federal News Network. “You have overcome every challenge and proven that you are, in my opinion, the best cybersecurity team in government. Together, we have tackled some of the world’s most complex cyber challenges, and you have never let me down. It has been both a privilege and an honor to serve as your leader, and I am incredibly proud of everything we have accomplished.
Hernandez’s first day at USAID was Monday.
Hernandez has been an education CISO for more than seven years and previously worked at HHS.
During his tenure at Education, he oversaw the agency’s activities. move towards zero trust with a recent focus on orchestration and automation.
Bordelon’s departure was a little more surprising. He had only been Deputy CIO since August and had been with Education for just over 18 months.
But he joined Commerce as Brian Epley, the agency’s new CIO, created his own leadership team.
Bordeaux, who also worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of Defense and the Army, helped the Department of Education modernize its provision of cloud services through its contract Pivot H hosting.
“This has allowed us to not only reduce what we spend or what we charge to our various operating centers, but it has also given us the opportunity to move to a model where we have more flexibility and more scalability,” Bordelon said before. he left Ask the CIO. “Our customers can choose whether they want to use AWS or whether they want to use Microsoft’s Azure. From a qualitative point of view, it gives them the ability to build things in these clouds. And as we talk about data integration and artificial intelligence and other future and emerging technologies, we’re simply in a better place.
Bordelon said one of Education 2025’s top priorities is to continue to modernize the Ed.gov website and improve its user experience.
“A well done to the whole team and what we have done is we have changed the governance model of how this is done. Rather than letting IT people manage this, they built it, but the content is managed by the offices, so the governance has changed, so it’s more agile, more user-friendly and standardized across the board,” he said. he declared.
As Education seeks to replace two technology leaders, OPM and HHS have filled significant gaps.
At OPM, Melvin Brown becomes the permanent CIO, replacing Guy Cavallo, who retired after 23 years in government on January 10.
Brown has served as OPM’s deputy CIO since January 2021, succeeding Cavallo of the Small Business Administration.
Additionally, with Brown’s ascension, OPM CISO James Saunders becomes the new deputy CIO and Danielle Rowell is the new interim CISO. She has been the agency’s chief of cyber engineering since November 2022.
During his tenure as deputy CIO, Brown helped OPM manage its cloud migration costs. OPM recently completed a two-year sprint to move more than 50 applications and systems off-premises. Now, OPM has 90% of all its applications in the cloud.
“Over the next two years, we will now focus on modernization and optimization. How can we get the most out of our cloud investment? How to optimize on a large scale? And then how do we reimagine or modernize our applications by focusing on AI and imagining what that application will look like now as we reimagine that in an AI environment,” Brown said in a statement. recent interview with the Federal Driving with Tom Temin. “We had to move things to the cloud in order to take advantage of cloud services. And now that we’re in the cloud, we can now take advantage of services that we wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of when we were in an operating environment.
Brown inherits an IT budget of $280.8 million, according to the Federal IT Dashboard.
Of this amount, more than $184 million is considered operations and maintenance (O&M) and 16 of the 52 investments are considered moderate or high risk.
At HHS, the new Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy has fulfilled three key roles under the reorganization has started last summer.
HHS recently named:
Rouault comes to HHS after spending the last three years in the U.S. Digital Service where she worked on two major efforts to modernize unemployment insurance and lead the financial shock solutions portfolio.
“Together, we will create a new Office of the Chief Technology Officer at HHS, responsible for leading HHS digital strategy and digital services for HHS programs, developing HHS data policy, anticipating emerging technology and data needs and to coordinate innovation within HHS. programs to encourage experimentation, R&D and adoption of new technologies,” she said. wrote on LinkedIn.
Honey returns to the role of CDO in some capacity. She served as Acting CDO and Executive Director of Data Operations from 2019 to 2020. She has also served in other data-centric roles at HHS since 2020, including Senior Data Scientist for the InnovationX and COVID Task Force -19 HHS Diagnostics Informatics.
Dierks returns to government after about 15 years of absence. She served from 2006 to 2009 as a member of HHS and the Food and Drug Administration, working on a range of public health and risk mitigation projects.
She comes to HHS after serving as chief data officer at Komodo Health for the past five years, where she led the development and evaluation of AI-driven healthcare analytics tools for science companies of life, health care practitioners and patient advocacy groups.
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