He takes up the appointment after serving in the role on an acting basis since the departure of Maria Roat earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Myklegard joined the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer in January as associate deputy federal CIO. He is a veteran federal IT leader and was most recently executive director of product engineering at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Earlier in his career, he served in the Army in various intelligence and strategic planning roles.

The deputy federal CIO position has a wide-ranging portfolio of responsibilities, including the high-level management and day-to-day oversight of the federal CIO’s strategic objectives. They effectively act as a chief of staff for the federal CIO, taking on the management of keystone projects and to an extent for managing relationships with service providers. 

Senior leaders at the Office of Management and Budget are responsible for selecting and appointing a new deputy federal CIO, a process that typically takes several months. 

OMB in March began the search for a new deputy federal CIO, posting the open role to USAJobs.

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He takes up the appointment after serving in the role on an acting basis since the departure of Maria Roat earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Myklegard joined the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer in January as associate deputy federal CIO. He is a veteran federal IT leader, and was most recently executive director of product engineering at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Earlier in his career, he served in the Army in various intelligence and strategic planning roles.

The deputy federal CIO position has a wide-ranging portfolio of responsibilities, including the high-level management and day-to-day oversight of the federal CIO’s strategic objectives. They effectively act as a chief of staff for the federal CIO, taking on the management of keystone projects and to an extent for managing relationships with service providers. 

Senior leaders at the Office of Management and Budget are responsible for selecting and appointing a new deputy federal CIO, a process that typically takes several months. 

OMB in March began the search for a new deputy federal CIO, posting the open role to USAJobs.

The post Drew Myklegard installed as permanent US deputy chief information officer appeared first on FedScoop.

Myklegard will hold the post while OMB conducts a search for the next permanent deputy federal CIO.

Myklegard is a veteran federal IT leader and has also served in the Army in intelligence and strategic planning roles. Most recently, he was executive director of product engineering at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and prior to that spent a period as senior adviser to the CIO. 

He joined OMB in the Office of the Federal CIO in January as associate deputy federal CIO.

Commenting on his appointment, Federal CIO Clare Martorana said: “In just a few months with our team, Drew has already made an outsized impact in executing on OFCIO’s strategic priorities.”

She added: “He understands that in a 21^stcentury operating environment if the technology doesn’t work, then the policy doesn’t work.” 

Former deputy federal CIO Maria Roat left her post at the end of March, after nearly 20 years in IT management roles across government agencies.

The deputy federal CIO position has a wide-ranging portfolio of responsibilities, including the high-level management and day-to-day oversight of the federal CIO’s strategic objectives. They effectively act as a chief of staff for the federal CIO, taking on the management of keystone projects and to an extent for managing relationships with service providers. 

Senior leaders at the Office of Management and Budget are responsible for selecting and appointing a new deputy federal CIO, a process that typically takes several months.

OMB began the search for a new deputy federal CIO in March, posting the open role to USAJobs.

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The senior technology leader retires after nearly 20 years in management roles across government agencies.

Prior to her appointment as deputy federal CIO in March 2020, Roat served as CIO at the Small Business Administration for nearly four years.

Before that, Roat was the chief technology officer at the Department of Transportation. She led the FedRAMP office at GSA before she moved to DOT. Prior to that she spent a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, including as deputy CIO of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and chief information security officer of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Alongside her civilian federal service, Roat had a 26-year career in the Navy until retiring from the department in 2007 as a master chief petty officer.

During her tenure as deputy federal CIO, she oversaw major initiatives including the recent launch of a governmentwide collaboration pilot by the Federal CIO Council.

Roat has also served on the board of the Technology Modernization Fund, which in 2020 received a $1 billion infusion through the COVID-19 relief bill, and has become a key source of funding for inter-agency modernization projects.

Commenting on Roat’s departure, Federal CIO Clare Martorana said: “Maria Roat has had a remarkable career serving our country — first as a military service member, and then as a Federal IT leader.” She added: “The role of the deputy federal CIO is crucial in providing a cross-government view of agency challenges and identifying opportunities to scale secure technology and sound data-management practices across government. We are grateful for Maria’s many contributions to our team, and we’re excited to see where her journey takes her next.”

Federal News Network first reported Roat’s departure.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify that Roat led the FedRAMP office at GSA before moving to DOT.

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Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat detailed the new program management office at the ACT-IAC 2021 Imagine Nation conference in Hershey, Penn., saying the CIO Council completed the initial collaboration pilot in July but realized there was a need for an entity “to help manage not just the technical, but also the policy and some of the cybersecurity and the processes around federating across the federal government so we could collaborate share calendars, documents, and those kinds of things.”

During the pilot, the Department of Education, NASA, National Science Foundation and Small Business Administration were able to expand their Microsoft Teams uses to allow employees chat to chat across agency borders.

Roat said the PMO is “just now standing up” and that the council had a call last week with the agencies involved to consider how they can expand the work of the pilot, starting with extending chat and calendar-sharing functions across the government.

Federal CIO Clare Martorana has set a goal of accomplishing this by sometime in December, Roat said.

“We put we put the line out there for the CIOs to say, ‘Let’s get this done,'” Roat said.

Next up, in addition to chat and calendar-sharing, will likely be document sharing, she added. “What’s the difference between sharing documents and emailing stuff around like we do all the time?” Roat said, adding that it involves the same compliance requirements.

“This is where the PMO is going to help us out,” she said.

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“It’s about a business case, right — the CIO, the CFO, the mission and the alignment,” Roat said Thursday during IBM’s Think Gov 2021 event, produced by FedScoop. “And the initial project proposals need to get to the point.”

While the mission of the TMF is, broadly, to fund technology modernization projects, most of the evidence the TMF Board wants to see in proposals is relates to the business aspects, said Roat, who sits on the TMF Board as an alternate board member as deputy federal CIO. The TMF Board that evaluates proposals and awards funding is currently comprised of seven voting members and six alternate members.

“When you look at the questions [in the project proposal template], one of them is specifically about technology,” she said. “The rest of the questions are broadly about the business of what this proposal is, and what are those measures and what are those outcomes you’re trying to achieve? So the board is looking for the mission alignment, that it’s mission-focused — the partnership with the CFO, with the business owner. It’s not about an IT thing … it’s about solving a hard business problem. And this is where a thoughtfully crafted business case comes in.”

Often, the board receives proposals filled with extraneous information that doesn’t detail the actual work an agency hopes to get funded, Roat said. “Too often people are going on about their agencies. We know who your agency is, we know who you are. And if we’ve never heard of you, heaven forbid, we’ll go look it up. But you have to get to the point.”

At the end of the day, the initial proposal is meant to be a “low burden” so that the board can “maximize the number of projects” it analyzes, she said.

The TMF Board introduced an expedited process after the fund received $1 billion from the American Rescue Plan earlier this year, prioritizing selecting and funding projects “that cut across agencies, address immediate security gaps, and improve the public’s ability to access government services,” leaders announced in May. Along with that, it introduced new flexibilities in the agency repayment process built around those priority areas.

While the June 2 deadline for that expedited process has passed, Roat said the board is continuing to accept proposals and is “making sure that as those proposals are coming in, we’re doing very quick reviews of those.” To support that, the board has added alternate members so it can meet more frequently to assess proposals.

Additionally, the TMF Program Management Office has expanded to work more closely with agencies as they propose projects, helping them to come to the board with good proposals — again, focused on a business case — to save everyone time.

“They’ve done a great job over the last three years working with agencies and prepping those proposals, making sure that they’re in good shape even before they come to the board,” Roat said. “Having a good proposal coming into the board helps move things along a little bit faster. It expedites the board discussion.”

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IPv6‘s 340 undecillion Internet Protocol addresses not only solve the scalability issue of IPv4, which ran out of readily available addresses in 2015, but they support end-to-end visibility and microsegmentation required for zero-trust security.

Agencies’ IPv6 implementation plans, due before the end of fiscal 2021, align with the cybersecurity executive order President Biden issued in May requiring agencies to develop zero-trust architecture implementation plans.

“By providing end-to-end network paths and better support of microsegmentation, the transition to IPv6-only is going to be a key component of zero-trust architecture — which is one of the key pillars of the executive order,” said Maria Roat, deputy federal chief information officer, during the IPv6 Summit hosted by the General Services Administration on Wednesday.

GSA officials at the event would not immediately comment on whether all agencies had met the Office of Management and Budget‘s 180-day deadline to publicize their IPv6 policies, set in a November memo, or if they’re on pace to complete one IPv6-only system pilot before the end of fiscal 2021.

Agencies have opened a “great dialogue” around IPv6 in recent recent months, with the Cloud and Infrastructure Community of Practice hosting meetings in January and May attended by hundreds of federal employees, said Tom Santucci, director of governmentwide policy for the Data Center Optimization Initiative and CloudSmart at GSA.

OMB’s memo further requires 80% of all IP-enabled assets on federal networks to operate in IPv6-only environments by fiscal 2025.

“Support from agency leadership and our industry partners is essential to meet this goal,” Roat said. “And when I say agency leadership, this is not just the CIOs; this is the [chief financial officers], this is the mission owners and everyone that has a stake in the modernization across the board.”

While IPv6 promotes zero-trust security, it also paves the way for 30 billion network devices to connect to the internet by 2023 — expanding the cyber threat landscape even as it improves 5G connectivity. That has agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology updating security guidance and developing related testbeds and practice guides.

NIST’s Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6 haven’t been updated since they were published in 2009.

“A lot has changed about the IPv6 technical landscape, how people handle transition mechanisms to bridge legacy systems, mp6 systems,” said Doug Montgomery, manager of internet and scalable systems research at NIST. “That security guidance needs updates.”

The goal is to turn the guidance into an IPv6 deployment scenario playbook for agencies’ decision makers, Montgomery added.

Meanwhile the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence within NIST is launching a public-private partnership to demonstrate IPv6-only deployments with plans to produce a practice guide full of use cases.

NIST is also working to ensure IPv6 transitions are included in risk assessments under its Risk Management Framework.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is addressing the expanded cyber threat landscape IPv6 presents by issuing guidance for agencies and industry, starting with its Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 program. CISA also wants to ensure its tools can measure IPv6 implementation.

“We are making sure that all programs and services that CISA provides to federal agencies and other state, local, tribal and territorial governments also support IPv6,” said Branko Bokan, cybersecurity specialist at CISA.

While OMB has pushed a transition to IPv6 since 2005, for the first time every common operating system and platform on the market has a mature IPv6 implementation, and much more is known about how to transition away from IPv4, Montgomery said.

Now the majority of traffic to agencies’ public-facing services is IPv6 because industry surpassed the government in IPv6 adoption.

“Amazon Web Services supports the U.S. federal government’s move to IPv6,” wrote Dominic Delmolino, vice president of worldwide public sector technology and innovation at AWS, in a blog Tuesday. “Transitioning to IPv6 will make sure that growing government networks and Internet of Things devices benefit from the increased scale of IPv6.”

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DOL will use its funds to improve the availability and accessibility of data for other agencies, developers and researchers, as well as improve evidence-based decision making across its enforcement, compliance and unemployment insurance missions.

The TMF award is also a win for the three-year-old fund itself, which had only garnered $150 million in total appropriations prior to President Biden signing the American Rescue Plan Act into law Thursday.

“Technology is a key enabler for government in providing better services to the American public,” said David Shive, chief information officer at the General Services Administration and a TMF Board member, in the announcement. “The news of the Technology Modernization Fund getting a $1 billion boost from the American Rescue Plan couldn’t have come at a better time, and the TMF Board looks forward to receiving more project proposals like this one from DOL to consider for investment.”

The TMF serves as a streamlined way for agencies to get the money they need to upgrade aging and obsolete information technology.

DOL received one TMF award previously to make its paper-based work visa application process digital in 2018 for a $2 million annual savings.

The latest award comes on TMF’s third anniversary, having funded 11 modernization projects across government to date.

“With this first project approval of 2021, the TMF Board is reinforcing its commitment to invest in federal technology modernization initiatives that enable agencies to better deliver their services to the American public,” said Maria Roat, deputy federal CIO and TMF Board member, in a statement.

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CIOs were successful in rapidly moving to cloud-enabled telework environments when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, often moving nimbly to break down bureaucratic barriers for their emergency response and continuity of operations. And in doing so, they showed the modernization potential within the government that agencies must look to sustain and build upon next year,  Roat said last week at ACT-IAC’s virtual ELC conference when asked about priorities for the coming year.

“The federal government has to continue to really thrive as it’s using advanced digital technology to make sure that we’re communicating with the public and that we’re interacting with service providers, that we’re leveraging all the technologies there,” Roat said. “And as I look over the next year, these changes really give us opportunities to continue to innovate and challenge the norms and status quo. We did this this year — we cut through the bureaucracy. And I think the opportunity is there to continue to really challenge this normal status quo and breakthrough a lot of the noise and the red tape and really get it out of the way.”

Doing so, however, will take some more tough work, particularly in identifying which legacy tools and technologies should stick around and be moved into modernized environments, and which ones should go.

“This is doubling down on our application rationalization, as well as our legacy systems that are holding agencies back from using the new technologies,” Roat said. “So even through the pandemic, we put up new webpages, but there were APIs that were hooking back to systems that were 10, 15, 20-years-old. And some of those were single-threaded processes — old stuff. And I think at some point, we have to double down on all of those legacy systems and the application rationalization even as we’re moving forward on other fronts, we have got to get rid of and modernize those applications.”

On a personal front, Roat said she’s most excited in 2021 at the opportunity to address the entirety of the federal government as a single entity and build better processes for how agencies work together in an interconnected way to support one another.

“I am most excited to really get to see more of that as we move forward over the next few years,” Roat said. “So that enterprise model, whether it’s collaboration, data sharing across the entire federal government, and really looking at those systems of systems across the federal government, and how we interact with each other. Can we get some of those barriers out of the way?”

The answer to that final question, she believes: “It’s not tech — it’s policy and guidance and those kinds of things.

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Specifically, the council is considering where reusable technology and microservices can be funded, as well as how authentication and identity management capabilities might be expanded. Any recommendations ultimately will take multiple parties to implement because the council is an advisory body without a budget.

The council also wants improvements to data-sharing protocols, particularly for systems like HHS Protect that are gathering data from hundreds of datasets in near real time to inform the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s pandemic response.

“Improving the consistency and clarity of results delivered through dashboards, project transparency, mission stories — they demonstrate value,” Roat said, during Nutanix‘s Cloud Together Virtual Summit produced by FedScoop. “And a faster path to maturing data-sharing protocols, especially where data is frequently updated and incorporated into decision-making models, is an area where we really need to focus as a federal government.”

Both the council — which currently has 29 members — and the Federal Data Strategy team would be stakeholders in any effort to expedite data sharing. The council’s broader, more strategic goals could require policy changes from the Office of Management and Budget or possibly Congress.

The council began flagging areas for potential investment in May, and agencies continue to make pandemic-driven investments in data — from the cloud to advanced analytics and machine learning. CIOs have shown they’re willing to get rid of “bureaucratic red tape” if it means streamlining processes like data sharing, Roat said.

Interoperability is improving, and the cloud is helping agencies collect terabytes of data without spending on hardware. Government can’t afford for the IT modernization happening during the pandemic to slow down, Roat said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs‘ Video Connect tool saw about a 1,000% increase in video visits to veterans’ homes, as did monthly telehealth visits between January and June.

Meanwhile State Department employees logged about 1 million meeting minutes on Cisco Webex by the end of March and made more than 60 internal apps, including those for human resources and training, web accessible to all employees worldwide.

The Department of Health and Human Services created the HHS Protect system pulling from 187 datasets to inform the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s response.

And the Department of Defense deployed its Commercial Virtual Remote work environment, a Microsoft Teams cloud-based collaboration suite, in under 60 days for 3 million personnel and affiliates to use.

“The pandemic highlighted just how fast we can push technology solutions and cut through those cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures,” Roat said. “The momentum needs to be sustained, and I challenge each of you to build on these successes and continue to drive innovation and break through those internal barriers.”

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