The congressional watchdog noted in its release that the VA has implemented six of its 29 open priority recommendations, including the deployment of an automated data tool used to improve acquisition workforce records and taking steps to modernize the agency’s performance management system across the Veterans Health Administration. 

Assessing software licenses, however, is something that the VA needs to address, per the watchdog. In January, the GAO issued a report on software licenses throughout the federal government,  noting that the VA had neglected to regularly compare software license inventories that are currently used with purchase records. 

In the new priority recommendations, GAO noted that the federal government spends more than $100 billion yearly on cyber and IT-related investments. 

“Until VA implements this priority recommendation and consistently tracks and compares its inventories of software licenses to with known purchases, it is likely to miss opportunities to reduce costs on duplicative or unnecessary licenses,” the report states. 

Other high-risk governmentwide areas that could impact the VA, according to the GAO, are “improving the management of IT acquisitions and operations” and “ensuring the cybersecurity of the nation.”

Charles Worthington, the VA’s chief AI and technology officer, said in a recent interview with FedScoop that he believes the VA’s technical infrastructure “is actually on pretty good footing,” pointing to the agency’s migration to the cloud and using commercial products in the software-as-a-service model, “where it makes sense.”

Other priority recommendations from the GAO cover the VA’s electronic health records (EHR) modernization program, including one that directs the agency to implement “leading practices for change management.” The other nine involve evaluating whether the system is “operationally suitable and effective” to ensure that the system satisfies customer needs, establishing “user satisfaction targets” to protect patients’ health and safety from unnecessary risks, and validating that future systems are not deployed too early. 

“Implementing these … recommendations would also help solve existing problems with the system,” the GAO stated.

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Because task orders under the CDM program are centrally funded by the Office of Management and Budget to provide basic continuous monitoring capabilities for all CFO Act agencies, CDM mirrors the business case behind a centralized, governmentwide IT modernization fund in that the federal government could invest in capabilities that each could benefit dozens of agencies, said Jim Piche of the General Services Administration during a panel hosted Wednesday by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

“The CDM program is actually a pilot of that investment fund where we’re getting a centralized appropriation to leapfrog every agency’s technology to the next level of CDM, whether it be hardware, software management, role and authentication, HSPD-12, or any kind of FISMA reporting,” said Piche, senior director for the homeland sector in the GSA’s FEDSIM, the office leading the CDM program procurement. “There’s this core investment that is being centrally funded through OMB.”

A centralized, governmentwide IT modernization fund has been championed by U.S. CIO Tony Scott and proposed in legislation by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, that is known as the Modernizing Government Technology Act. The Treasury Department would house the fund and the GSA would administer it at the discretion of a board. The bill passed the House last year before stalling in the Senate due to a steep cost estimate from congressional budget analysts.

While money from that fund could be given to individual agencies for modernization needs, it could also be used for “the development, operation, and procurement of information technology products, services, and acquisition vehicles for use by agencies to improve Governmentwide efficiency and cybersecurity,” the bill reads.

DHS is currently in the phase of working with agencies to implement the second phase of the program, particularly credentials and authentication management, which it calls CRED. GSA recently awarded a single contract for the CRED portion of phase 2 to integrator CGI, who brought in Centrify and SailPoint to provide base-level continuous monitoring services around credentialing.

“The whole program is centered around leveraging funding that’s already in place for agencies to start to upgrade their controls around cyber-identity,” said Jeremy Grant, a managing director with the Chertoff Group and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s former identity management buff.

Doing so, the federal government is able to “achieve incredible bang for the buck,” Piche said, “rather than distributing the funding to all the agencies and diluting the capability of what industry is providing to government.”

The beauty of the way CDM has been funded and procured, panelists explained, is that beyond the initial capabilities DHS helps provide through the task orders, agencies have the ownership to expand upon them as they wish. Rather than dictating federal agencies’ full path to cybersecurity competency, CDM is more of a nudge in the right direction.

The companies under the CDM task orders can provide much more than what DHS has asked them to do, said Ross Foard a CDM phase 2 engineer at DHS.

“We asked for a limited set of capabilities that we wanted with these products, and these products do much more than we asked for under the CDM capabilities,” Foard said.

DHS will provide a period of operations and maintenance under the program before leaving the agencies with the licenses to operate the tools on their own. At that point, he said, “You are able to as an agency do other things with these products that you have license to do.”

Paula Wells, vice president with CGI, said the integrator chose to partner with SailPoint and Centrify “for their broad capabilities,” despite the CRED task order’s “very narrow focus.”

During the initial implementation phase, she said, the challenge is “going to be walking that line between these great tools and great capabilities but the constraints of our task order is to deliver these very specific capabilities.”

“Once you own it, you can turn on all these other great functions,” Wells explained.

The future of CDM really lays in the hands of the agencies, Piche said.

Though the first three phases of CDM are centrally appropriated “and DHS is providing the candy store of ‘look at all these great and wonderful things you can do,’ they are only tasked with providing and delivering the base, core capabilities,” he explained.

“So while DHS will continue to be the technical leader and the technical policy guide in where agencies are going with CDM, OMB is committed to putting CDM funding in the agencies’ hands [after that],” Piche said.

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Standing up the Defense Information Systems Agency-led Joint Service Provider has been a years-long process that was supposed to reach full operation last year. That hasn’t happened yet. A unified provider and the new network will result in less attack surface for outside hacks, but a House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee for Emerging Threats and Capabilities proposal pointed squarely at the lack of planning for insider threats.

The JSP’s newly published sources sought announcement outlines a system “to monitor and log anomalous user behavior accessing network and computer systems managed by the JSP” including 80,000 end devices across multiple networks.

“The JSP is seeking information for potential sources for a commercial off-the-shelf system (including software, hardware, support, training, and travel) to monitor and log anomalous user behavior accessing network and computer systems managed by the JSP,” the announcement reads.

It continues: “The source should have insider threat cybersecurity solutions that proactively identifies and supports investigations of user violations to allow government network administrators and security personnel to proactively manage insider threat incidents. A total of approximately 80,000 end devices will be configured across multiple networks supporting the Pentagon and National Capital Region (NCR) in a phased implementation approach, although some implementations may occur simultaneously.”

DISA wants a system that contains “privacy protection to ensure JSP Customers can detect events and individuals that put the enterprise at risk, while providing protection for everyone else. It should contain investigative tools to enable targeting, review, and investigation of events that happened before, during, and after a violation occurs to facilitate root cause analysis of the problem.”

The requirements for any prospective system includes encrypting all communications and being undetectable by the end-user.

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And as he spoke to reporters in the Pentagon on Wednesday for what was likely his last roundtable, he said “it’s the one area that if you asked me where I give myself the lowest mark, not the team but myself, because in the end it’s my responsibility, is data centers.”

Halvorsen also said on Wednesday he plans to leave his role as the Pentagon’s IT chief at the end of February.

“We did not get as many closed as I would have liked to get closed,” Halvorsen said of data centers, but he did note that the department is making some progress.

For example, the department’s data center closure team just completed its first trip — to Charleston, South Carolina — he said Wednesday. They are headed to San Antonio next, Halvorsen said.

“They’ve come back with a good plan to how to close some data centers in Charleston, keep some things there open based on a mission effectiveness site using industry best practices and standards from the beginning on how best to operate the data center,” Halvorsen said. “We’ll do the same thing in San Antonio.”

He added: “As we are keeping some things the same geographic area and consolidating within geographic areas, I think that will make it a little bit more palatable to everybody that needs to support that to get it done.”

In August 2016, Deputy CIO for Information Enterprise Randall Conway first announced the new team would review the 25-to-50 least efficient DOD data centers.

[Read more: DOD CIO outlines plans for data center closure team]

The team features subject matter experts from each the military services.

“All of the services are represented — they’re represented from their operational committee, they all got to pick the people they wanted to be in this from their technical community,” he said, noting that “it is being led by the DOD CIO data center team plus my senior leadership.”

DOD is far behind in its administration-mandated data center closure goals, a fact that Halvorsen did not shy away from in November 2016 at a press conference the day after the closure team kicked off its work. A March 2016 inspector general’s report found the department was on course to miss its goal next year for data center closures and closed less than half its targeted goal up to that point.

[Read more: DOD missing data center closure goals — audit]

“We are behind in data center closure … I have got to drive that better,” Halvorsen said at the time. “That’s costing us money that we could spend today in a more direct use.”

Army Secretary Eric Fanning recently laid out an explicit plan for the Army to achieve its data center closure and consolidation goals by 2018 — an effort that has otherwise made little progress in the past two years.

[Read more: Likely to miss data center goals, Army issues stringent new plan for closures]

And Halvorsen said on Wednesday he thought Fanning’s memo would help speed things up.

“The Army is absolutely using the same practices, best business practices, they’re looking at cost, mission,” Halvorsen said. “And yes, I have hope that that will also speed the process up.”

Halvorsen explained that while the Pentagon’s data center closure team is focusing primarily on mixed data centers, owned by multiple services, this allows the Army to have a strategic plan for its own data centers.

“What the Army is doing, I think it makes sense, is taking those best practices and principles and applying it to Army-specific areas where they can say, ‘hey we have these Army data centers here, we can reduce that size,’” Halvorsen said.

He also said that, “Any time I think you get the senior leadership of any of the services involved, I think that’s a really good thing. I have worked with Secretary Fanning in the past, he really does understand this and I really do believe that that memo will help accelerate the Army’s plan.”

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Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said Wednesday during an event at the National Press Club that some of the malicious messages are coming from email addresses that appear spoofed, or altered in such a way that they look to have come from known contacts.

“I have had attachments coming to me from people I know but about subjects that are totally unrelated to that person and I know it’s phishing,” McCaul recalled, “I’d say almost on a daily basis.”

The chairman’s comments underscore the growing risk faced by elected officials — especially for those handling classified information — from cyberattacks. While lawmakers and their staffers are encouraged to attend cybersecurity training sessions hosted by their respective sergeant at arms’ offices, representatives are not typically required to individually participate.

“A lot of it is very basic stuff like ‘don’t click on that attachment,’” McCaul said of the educational seminars.

McCaul, who was the lead on cybersecurity legislation in the previous Congressional term, said he understands part of the problem is the old networks Congress and their staff relies upon.

“We have a company that basically provides pretty good firewalls. And actually I have opened up one or two of these and gone back to my IT guy and we had some redundancies to back it up, where that intrusion didn’t take place, but it really gets to the whole issue, the legacy issue. Our network system is so antiquated, the older it is the more vulnerable it is to attacks,” said McCaul.

Multiple U.S. political organizations and campaigns were recently the target of a sophisticated hacking operations levied by Russian intelligence, a declassified report published Friday and compiled by U.S. intelligence agencies notes. McCaul said reports coupled with the recent news have left those on Capitol Hill with heightened awareness of cybersecurity hygiene.

“It’s not just Congress, everyone in this room has a phone and everyone in this room is subject to being infiltrated. I think it’s in large part a privacy issue. It’s a security issue when it comes to Congress and the executive branch and agencies. I think there’s a greater sense of awareness about it [amongst members of Congress]. A greater sense of anxiety … of paranoia,” said McCaul.

“Phishing emails to USG officials are incredibly common,” said Area 1 Security co-founder Blake Darche, “the Senate and House especially face security challenges in that they are not directly part of the executive branch and often lack the level of expertise at NSA/FBI/CIA. They are also public and as a result often receive and send emails to and from constituents raising their exposure profiles.”

Last week, USA Today reported that Congress planned to increase its efforts to protect members from data breaches by providing better training resources.

“One of the biggest threats that we have here would be the security, in particular the cybersecurity threats, that we face,” said Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., the new chairman of the House Administration Committee, which oversees operations in the lower chamber. “Every office, every committee, every part of Capitol Hill is subject for attack by foreign governments, by individuals, people in this county who mean us harm.”

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Defense Department CIO Terry Halvorsen is retiring Feb. 28, he announced Wednesday at a roundtable with reporters in the Pentagon.

Halvorsen was politically appointed as DOD CIO, but since he is also a career federal employee — spending time as Navy CIO and deputy commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command — he is not required to resign at the end of the current administration like other politically appointed CIOs, according to a DOD spokesperson.

Halvorsen will stay on for a brief time past the Jan. 20 inauguration of soon-to-be President Donald Trump, serving in the new Republican administration for about a month under a likely new boss — retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense, pending Senate confirmation.

Since joining DOD as CIO in May 2014, Halvorsen set ambitious goals for the department, leading it on a path to migrate all systems across the Pentagon and the military services to Microsoft Windows 10 by January 2017. He also set a goal to eliminate DOD’s common access card in two years.

[Read more: DOD plans to eliminate CAC login within two years]

During Wednesday’s roundtable, Halvorsen implied that the Defense Department won’t quite hit that mark for Windows 10 migration, but it is making progress.

“Just my own office is now at 90 percent of transition,” he said. “I really think we’ll hit some numbers in the early part of this year, not where I would have liked to have been, but showing good progress. And I will continue to push stretch goals on that.”

He estimated that by the end of this fiscal year, the department will be “well into the 80-90 percent done.”

Halvorsen recently unveiled his vision for the department’s future, which included plans to establish an on-premise cloud service capability by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017.

[Read more: Halvorsen shares vision for the future of Pentagon’s IT]

“The vision that I have is that it would probably be a third-party-managed cloud and it will provide us a set of enterprise services that’s everything from email, records storage, video, chat, file share, collaboration space,” Halvorsen, a FedScoop GoldenGov award winner, said at the time.

The progress on the Windows 10 migration, Halvorsen said Wednesday, “sets the stage” for other conversations, such as migrating to this cloud environment the department wants, which he described as “everything from an on-premise — what I’ll call baseline cloud supported by hybrid clouds — [to] in some cases your commercial clouds.”

Halvorsen noted the department is “looking at more and more commercial.”

“[Commercial providers] can operate generally at less cost than we can; that’s not saying that the government is not efficient, it’s just that they have less concerns than we can, they can do things at bigger scale and they can sometimes do things faster, so it makes sense for us to use it,” he said. “And we will continue, in general, to push commercial solutions where they make sense for the department.”

Replacing the CAC card

The department has started a couple of pilots of technology to replace the CAC card, Halvorsen revealed at the roundtable.

While he didn’t want to get into specifics, he did say his office is doing pilots around biometrics and behavior, which are “going well.”

Halvorsen reiterated what he said in August 2016 — that the CAC card replacement will likely be a combination of biometrics, behavior and personal data.

“One of the things that’s really hard to mimic is how you actually interact with your machine,” Halvorsen said in August. “Everything from the way you search files to the way, time you spend on different files, all of that stuff is the stuff we can track. And should track. And would be very helpful in determining if you are you on the machine.”

The new identification system, he said Wednesday, would likely have around 10 available authentication factors, but the system would choose a randomized set of only a few — Halvorsen said maybe five — of those to authenticate a person’s identity each time.

Halvorsen noted Wednesday that the Pentagon’s innovative outreach “startup,” Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, has been a helpful part of the CAC card elimination process.

“A lot of this is from new companies, it’s new technology,” Halvorsen said. “[DIUx has] been exceptionally good at pulling those together, organizing some of the opportunities and I would say initial testing of the technology to see which ones would get to the next stage. They have been phenomenal in supporting this.”

During his tenure both as DOD CIO and as Navy CIO, he worked to bridge the gap between the department and innovative West Coast companies through annual trips, which he expanded this year to include officials from NATO and some allied countries.

[Read more: Halvorsen makes Silicon Valley trip with NATO, allied CIOs]

Before last year’s trip to the West Coast, Halvorsen said prior visits, evolving technology and DOD’s allies’ using different systems for identity management all contributed to his decision to get rid of the CAC card.

“One of the other reasons is none of the other allies use it,” Halvorsen said. “So if we’re going to go in partnership, how do you move forward, keeping the same or better — and I actually think in this case the technology is going to push us to a much better level of security without the CAC card.”

Transitioning the department

Though Halvorsen is leaving at the end of February, he noted that the other deputies are sticking around.

“Everybody else as of right now is staying, and if they make a decision to leave, it would be part of normal retirement, that’s all,” he said. “But I am very comfortable that we have a very strong staff in place.”

Halvorsen said John Zangardi’s moving into the Defense Department’s principal deputy chief information officer role was in good timing with his own departure.

[Read more: New DOD principal deputy CIO starts work]

“Obviously I think if Zangardi is acting for awhile, obviously I think he’ll put his own style, make some changes,” Halvorsen said. “I think the new secretary … will put their own stamp [on DOD IT], but I do believe that where we are headed, the emphasis on mission effectiveness and efficiency, will continue.”

He also complimented Essye Miller, who recently took over as the department’s chief information security officer, noting that she is well prepared for the new role.

[Read more: Army’s cybersecurity director takes over as DOD CISO]

“Essye was with the Army doing similar work — we’re glad to have her,” he said. “She’s got big shoes to fill, but I think she’s very, very well prepared to do that.”

Looking forward to a new administration, Halvorsen said that from his dialogue with the transition teams and others it “seems to be that we are on the right track.”

Contact Samantha via email at samantha.ehlinger@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter at @samehlinger. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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Other changes proposed Tuesday by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology include the addition of more detailed use cases and an agreed vocabulary on supply chain risk management; and the addition of identity management.

At the direction of an executive order from President Obama, NIST published version 1.0 of the framework back in February 2014 following consultations with industry, academia and government agencies.

They’ve been collecting feedback and suggestions for changes and enhancements almost ever since.

“We wrote this update to refine and enhance the original document and to make it easier to use,” said Matt Barrett, NIST’s program manager for the Cybersecurity Framework. “This update is fully compatible with the original framework,” and those currently using 1.0 should be able to implement the new version seamlessly.

Version 1.1 incorporates feedback including comments in response to NIST’s December 2015 Request for Information; questions frequently asked of NIST staff; and comments from 800 attendees at the April 2016 Cybersecurity Framework Workshop at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

One area where businesses have asked for more detail is in regard to third-party or supply chain risk management. In a web post, NIST officials said the authors had developed a defined vocabulary so all parties to a supply chain or a business deal “can clearly understand cybersecurity needs.”

The framework, a high-level technical document, breaks cybersecurity down into five functions: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover. Each of those is further broken down into three to six categories — 23 in all — including things like “Risk Assessment,” “Awareness and Training” and “Response Planning.”

The draft adds “Supply Chain Risk Management” as a new category under the identify function; and renames “Access Control” as “Identity Management and Access Control,” to better reflect the real nature of the task.

The draft also clarifies and expands the definitions of some terms used in that category like “authentication” and “authorization.”

But it is the addition of a system for quantifying risk and security outcomes that is likely to prove most controversial — although officials stress it is a draft.

“In the update we introduce the notion of cybersecurity measurement to get the conversation started,” Barrett said. “Measurements will be critical to ensure that cybersecurity receives proper consideration in a larger enterprise risk management discussion.”

The draft is open for public comment until April 10.

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But President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Transportation secretary didn’t have many specific answers to give. What she did say, however, was that a national conversation around the issue will be needed.

In her prepared remarks for the hearing before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Chao said the department’s role is to make sure the technology is safe, but to do so without impeding innovation.

“We want to work with Congress to position the federal government as a catalyst for safe, efficient technologies, not as an impediment,” she said.

Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., said he welcomed her goal, and asked how the department under her leadership would keep pace with changing technology.

In her answer Chao reiterated much of her opening remarks, but acknowledged that some have concerns about how the technologies around autonomous vehicles, drones and artificial intelligence continue to develop. Chao said she wants to address those with Congress in a way that “will not dampen the basic creativity and innovation of our country.”

“The next Secretary of Transportation will… have a unique opportunity to show federal leadership in the advancement of transportation innovation,” Thune said in prepared opening remarks, kicking off the hearing with an emphasis on technology. “[Vehicle-to-vehicle] technology, autonomous vehicles, and unmanned aircraft systems, to name a few, have great promise to increase safety, improve efficiency and spur economic growth.”

He did add that “but like all new technologies, these must be properly integrated into our current networks in a way that maximizes their benefits without compromising the performance of the current systems.”

A sector with rapid developments

Wednesday’s hearing was not contentious overall, and Chao — who was secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush, was deputy Transportation secretary under Bush’s father and is married to current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — received bipartisan praise. But it highlighted how things have changed since the last time the Senate considered a Transportation secretary nominee — in 2013, for Anthony Foxx. As Foxx noted later, emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles or drones weren’t even on the map back then.

“The reality is I don’t think anyone has anticipated the rate of change in transportation when it comes to technology,” Foxx said in October 2016. “It’s like the mobile phone was 15 years ago, all that’s coming into transportation so rapidly.”

In Chao’s prepared remarks, she noted that the private sector is driving innovation. In particular, Chao noted industry is “working with cities and states to demonstrate improvements in the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles.”

She added, too, that “Drones are poised to become a major commercial force.”

Despite the rapid pace of technological innovation though, Chao said that “the federal role in these sectors is still very much in its infancy.”

There has been progress under Foxx, though: The department has already released a framework with which to view autonomous vehicles. And the Federal Aviation Administration’s first rules on small commercial drones took effect late August 2016.

[Read more: Administration asserts role in regulating autonomous vehicles; and Commercial drone use expected to take flight under new regulations]

It was unclear from Chao’s hearing whether or not she supported those, or any other past department stances on emerging transportation technologies.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., noted that federal policy often lags behind the rate of change in the technology world. He asked if Chao had any “specific ideas” on how to speed the regulatory process up.

Chao said technology is outstripping the consumer ability to accept and understand it, and she recommended the country as a whole work to help get people more comfortable with technology like what will underpin autonomous vehicles, and help them to understand the benefits and limitations of it.

“It requires a national discussion and I look forward to doing that with you,” Chao said.

On drones, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., asked if Chao thinks there has been over regulation of unmanned systems, and if she plans to attack the issue quickly into her service.

Chao again outlined that there are people who have concerns about the technology as well as there are people who want to innovate in the area, and that “we need to talk about it,” and that there needs to be a “national consensus” around the topic.

“State-by-state patchwork is of concern, and what does that mean for federal regulations?” Chao said. “So I look forward to working with the committee, and also the Congress, on this.”

Contact Samantha via email at samantha.ehlinger@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter at @samehlinger. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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Trump announced Shulkin, whom President Barack Obama appointed to his current position in March 2015, as his pick for VA secretary during his first public news conference since winning the election in November.

“He’s fantastic,” Trump said at the conference. “He will do a truly great job.”

Trump echoed earlier promises to reform the VA’s health care delivery to veterans.

“One of the commitments I made is that we’re gonna straighten out the whole situation for our veterans,” he said. “Our veterans have been treated horribly. They’re waiting in line for 15, 16, 17 days, cases where they go in and they have a minor early-stage form of cancer and they can’t see a doctor. By the time they get to the doctor, they’re terminal. Not gonna happen — it’s not gonna happen.”

Shulkin made a name for himself as a private physician and health care entrepreneur prior to joining VA. During his nearly two years as VA undersecretary for health, he has led the Veterans Health Administration on a path to delivering better outcomes for the nearly 9 million veterans seen each year in the nation’s largest integrated health care system with more than 1,700 sites of care.

“It is my honor to serve as President-elect Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs,” Shulkin said in a statement released by Trump’s transition team. “President-elect Trump’s commitment to caring for our veterans is unquestionable, and he is eager to support the best practices for care and provide our Veterans Affairs’ teams with the resources they need to improve health outcomes. We are both eager to begin reforming the areas in our Veterans Affairs system that need critical attention, and do it in a swift, thoughtful and responsible way.”

At the head of VHA, Shulkin worked closely with VA CIO LaVerne Council to modernize the department’s electronic health records, particularly by making them more interoperable with health systems in the Defense Department. Together, Shulkin and Council have laid the foundation for what they’re calling VA’s Digital Health Platform — a modern and integrated health care system that incorporates best-in-class technologies and standards to give it the look, feel and capabilities users have come to expect in the private sector, and the ability to evolve to the future needs of veterans.

Notably, Shulkin, if confirmed by the Senate, would be the first non-veteran VA secretary.

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Dept of navy Deputy CIO (navy)

The Navy’s deputy chief information officer will retire in early February, according to a Navy spokesperson.

Janice Haith, who has served in the role since 2010, is the senior-most civilian career executive responsible for the Navy’s $6 billion annual IT spending. She has spent nearly 33 years in service to the U.S. federal government, according to the spokesperson.

Haith was one of FedScoop’s 2016 Top 50 Women in Technology.

“Military personnel tend to rotate every two or three years … we provide continuity,” she said at the time, of the career civilians.

In Haith’s role she is responsible for Navy CIO work relating to everything from portfolio management, to enterprise architecture.

In the past she has served as the Director of Enterprise Operations and Federal Information Sharing Executive for the DOD CIO, which included overseeing and managing key federal information sharing programs, according to her biography.

When asked what advice she would give to women interested in business or STEM careers, she said, “don’t be worried about traditional roles: Get out of the box and think … Sit at the table and speak. Don’t be afraid to shine. There are women everywhere.”

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