White House nominates John Sherman as Department of Defense CIO

After serving as the acting CIO of the Department of Defense for eight months, John Sherman received President Biden’s nomination for the role in an official capacity.

Though Sherman has performed the duties of the CIO since January, the role officially requires presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. He was principal deputy CIO of the DOD and then took over as acting CIO when his predecessor Dana Deasy resigned from the role.

During the nomination and confirmation process, Sherman will step away from the acting CIO role, and Kelly Fletcher will step in for him, the DOD announced. CISO David McKeown will take over Fletcher’s role as acting principal deputy CIO.

Prior to joining DOD, Sherman was CIO of the intelligence community. He also served as deputy director of the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise office. He has more than 25 years of experience serving the national security and defense sectors.

Notably, during his time as acting DOD CIO, Sherman has handled a heavy workload, including shifting the department away from the failed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to the revamped multi-cloud effort, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. He has also worked to support the department’s larger move to a zero-trust security architecture and led the transition to a sustaining telework environment based on Microsoft’s Office 365 called DOD365.