FedScoop announces the Best Bosses in Federal IT 2022

“A leader needs Integrity,” Dorothy Aronson, CIO of the National Science Foundation, told FedScoop. “It enables them to honestly appraise and accommodate for their own weaknesses, and to act on ‘the truth’ (whatever that is).” But that’s just the start. Beyond that, she said, “they will need Resilience to deal with the consequences, and not quit. Finally, leaders need Kindness so people trust them to ‘do no harm,’ and can hear, absorb, and align with the leader’s version of ‘the truth.’” Aronson said NSF is “an amazing place” where brilliant science from across the U.S. converges. As such, it’s her “greatest wish to create an IT environment that facilitates this continuous modernization and innovation, and at the same time simplifies customer interaction with NSF.”

After years as a CEO and White House Innovation Fellow, Mike Brown is the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which was launched to accelerate the Defense Department’s adoption of commercial technology. “DIU is not an IT organization but our top IT priorities would include providing the tools for the organization to be productive and minimizing the time to use and work with these tools; this is much easier with commercial tools and networks than what many at DOD have to work with because of classification issues,” he told FedScoop. In his view, it’s important for leaders to be genuine, empathetic, and committed to ensuring their teams have the environment and resources needed to get their jobs done. “Given the size of government organizations, teamwork is required across many groups to create high-impact results. Building relationships and a shared vision is paramount,” he added.

Robin Carnahan has taken leadership roles across the various levels of government — previously as Missouri’s secretary of state and now as the administrator of the General Services Administration. Carnahan told FedScoop that she’s learned in her career that empowering a team “with the tools and talent they need to deliver on that vision is fundamental to any organization’s success and doubly so in government.” Strong leaders, she said, must also “have humility about what they know and don’t know and constantly listen and learn from their teams but at the same time have the confidence to make bold bets on what’s most important. When it comes to those bold bets, it’s critical to over-communicate both inside and outside the organization in order to inspire the team, build momentum and partnerships, and make progress toward the goal.” At GSA in particular, Carnahan said she’s made it a priority to stay curious and to always look for success stories to convey the art of the possible. “We’re known for supporting buildings, acquisitions and technology, but we also help agencies transition to electric vehicles, we support humanitarian crises at home and around the world, and much more,” she said. “What I’ve learned is that there are endless opportunities to make government work better for the people we serve and save money doing it. Sharing those successes among the team and across government is an incredibly effective way to generate more innovative ideas and scale best practices in ways you might never expect and that have an enormous impact on the people we serve.”

Extensive two-way communication, incorporating the right number of change agents with existing staff into new technology projects and rewarding top performers are among the most important qualities of a good leader, Cavallo told FedScoop. He said: “A good leader must be able to inspire his/her workforce to follow them on the journey … I also believe as a leader you must be willing to continually demonstrate your commitment, drive, and dedication to improving the organization’s performance.” According to Cavallo, setting a clear vision and strategy is crucial for any IT transformation journey, because an organization needs it to be able to understand the priorities that will be followed to successfully implement a vision.

Suzi Connor is focused on digital transformation of governmental public health using emerging technologies to expedite analyses, model data in new ways and use insights to improve outcomes nationwide. She recognizes that requires transformation internally with a modern IT architecture, new capabilities, customer-centric services and performance measurement at CDC. Currently, Connor is helping with the search for CDC’s next CISO.

Vice President of Public Sector, Lookout

To be a good leader, communication is key, said Tony D’Angelo, vice president of public sector at Lookout. However, he argues that listening is just as important. “A good listener will solicit input from a wide variety of people who have varying roles within the organization. This does a couple of things: It allows you to gain a unique perspective from each individual based on job function and their vantage point. It also shows the extended team that you are willing to take input before making judgments and important decisions,” D’Angelo said. In supporting the federal government’s many very important missions, D’Angelo takes his role with Lookout very seriously. “While we may not be on the front lines of defense, law enforcement, healthcare, or any other crucial government function, we see ourselves as every bit a critical component of the mission,” he said. “We work tirelessly to mitigate any data loss or compromising of networks and devices which could substantially impact our customers’ missions. While I feel my team is as emotionally invested in our role as I am, I often remind them why we’re here and what function we play in the overall mission of our federal government partners.”

Assistant Commandant for C4IT & CIO, U.S. Coast Guard

After a 34-year career in the Coast Guard, Rear Adm. David Dermanelian retired May 13. He said on the Daily Scoop Podcast recently that as CIO, he must provide the cyber operators the tools to be able to hunt down and isolate bad cyber actors on the network in a much faster cycle than they have done in the past. In terms of laying the groundwork for his successor, he said he’s prepared a set of senior leaders to lean on and help get answers to hard questions, whether they come externally or internally. He also explained that he has to take care of the workforce because they’re what make IT run, adding, no one can empower a person like the Coast Guard be it an E4 or an officer, which is what makes the Coast Guard so special.

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

Ann Dunkin returned to federal service in 2021 as the chief information officer of the Department of Energy. In the 18 months in that role, Dunkin has led a transformation of the department’s IT, namely through efforts to scale smaller innovative successes across her highly federated department and the larger federal government. To support the scaling of IT modernization across Energy — and the federal government writ large — Dunkin and her colleague Greg Godbout published a playbook to “help organizations increase the velocity, speed, and scale of modernization efforts, create efficiencies, and make a greater impact.”

Good leadership means letting team members own their portfolios from start to finish, according to Lesley Field. “To make that happen, I limit my role to providing guardrail guidance and acting as a sounding board at various steps in the process. We encourage creativity, promote getting feedback from a multitude of sources, and provide top cover so the team feels supported,” she told FedScoop. At OFPP, recent top IT priorities have included establishing the IT Vendor Management Office, promoting the use of innovative business practices and working to shorten the acquisition cycle. Field also explained that as a federal IT leader, your number one concern has to be your staff: “People are everything. Care about and pay attention to the careers of your immediate team and your larger workforce – they are the people who will make your efforts successful,” she said.

Director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity, Government Accountability Office

The three most important qualities of a good leader are being able to listen, being able to empower staff to do their jobs and delegating as necessary, according to Franks. “These three qualities are interwoven—listening effectively means I am equipped to empower my staff; by empowering my staff, I can tap into their strengths and delegate effectively; and by delegating effectively, I strengthen communication and deliverables, for which listening serves as a key component,” she told FedScoop. Her top IT priorities are finding small manageable improvements that can be made across agencies to improve their security, embracing the challenge of connecting personnel, software and hardware vulnerabilities to improve risk posture across government and helping federal agencies to develop a holistic approach to tackling the cyberthreats they face.

Deputy Commandant for Information, U.S. Marine Corps

A well-trained and ready workforce can accomplish anything. “When I was the commanding general of 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, I would tell my squadron commanders I had three priorities; 1) Train your squadron 2) Train your squadron and 3) Train your squadron,” Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy said. “If men and women are trained and ready to accomplish their given mission to the highest standard, the many other priorities fall in line and become much easier to accomplish. We need to be in a continuous state of learning, starting with me.” Glavy wants to focus on raising the bar among his workforce, challenging himself to make the below average, average and the average, above average.

Adinistrator, U.S. Digital Service

USDS Administrator Mina Hsiang says that the hallmark of a good leader is a strong and empowered team. “The best leaders build trust and collaboration between team members, ask questions that further their team’s thinking, help facilitate clarity and good strategy, and listen and respond to their team’s needs,” she told FedScoop. Among Hsiang’s top priorities are understanding the needs of diverse users across agencies and hiring the right people who can operate within the complex project delivery framework of federal government. “Government has a reputation for being siloed, but our work at USDS is inherently cross-functional. We’re often working across agencies and programs, with people of varied skillsets – policy experts, product managers, procurement experts, and more,” she added.

Listening to the workforce and empowering them to make changes are the qualities of a good leader, said Raj Iyer. Having released a plan to digitally transform and build a data-centric Army last year, Iyer values ideas of the workforce, which will enforce positive change and innovation. Iyer has learned to be less risk-averse and allow change to flow from the bottom up. “Teaching and empowering others to manage change for risk appetite,” he said as one of the biggest lessons he’s learned since joining the federal government. “Often in the federal government we see organizations where innovation is stifled because leadership is risk-averse and comfortable in a culture of compliance bureaucracy. This makes it exceedingly difficult to carry out experimentation and experience breakthroughs due to longstanding roadblocks to modernization.”

Now nearly two years into serving as the CIO of the Department of the Air Force, Lauren Knausenberger has set a strategic vision for the military branch’s IT based on four pillars: developing a rock-solid digital foundation for JADC2; user experience for the warfighter; recruiting digital talent; and “ruthlessly” attacking manual and redundant processes and policies in what she calls the “Tradespace.” Having served in her role mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic, Knausenberger knows how important it is to be an empathetic leader. In 2021, she told FedScoop: “The things that never change are taking care of people, setting a clear vision, building coalitions — those things are always going to be in the recipe for success, especially during times of crisis. People are looking for strong leadership…they want that constant drumbeat that things are going to be OK, a safe place to vent their frustrations and to really be human.”

Industry Leadership

Katy Mann, vice president of federal for Okta, is pioneering efforts to drive the adoption of zero trust, multi-factor authentication, and modern citizen services while securing the identities of 24+ million federal workers and citizens. In partnership with Mann’s Okta team, agencies are moving from processing paper and expensive legacy technologies to secure digital services aligned with the Biden administration’s customer experience and cybersecurity executive orders. Mann’s team is helping a DOD agency secure the identities of 5 million personnel through MFA and unifying 200+ applications in the cloud. Mann has also supported the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in providing equitable healthcare access to vulnerable communities. Her team helped build the cloud-based Quality Payment Program; today, 15% of Medicare claims are submitted via Okta-enabled API.

Federal CIO Clare Martorana finds that developing a deep understanding of colleagues – and what motivates them – lies at the heart of great IT leadership: “By getting to know your team and learning what they’re passionate about, a good leader will find ways to get them involved in the work they care about,” she told FedScoop. Empowering them and giving staff agency over the projects they work on is also essential, according to the federal technology leader. Ensuring citizens have a seamless experience when they interact with government digital is among her top priorities, as the Office of the Federal CIO team works to implement the President’s cybersecurity and customer experience executive orders. “With each policy we launch, we’re exploring new ways to reduce burden for the federal workforce so they can deliver for the American people,” she added.

Andre Mendes strives to drive consensus within his organization. His focus is creating or adopting abstraction layers that remove commodity burdens from the department’s IT portfolio. “Like everywhere else, feds want to do great work, but many have been rocked into complacency by lack of accountability, a dearth of inspiring leadership and performance management that does little to accentuate the difference between superlative performance, passable efficiency or even mediocre throughput,” Mendes said. “Everybody aspires to greatness; many are lulled to sleep by a permissive environment. Give people reason to rise to excellence, and most will.”

CIO, Department of Housing and Urban Development

To Beth Niblock, there are five important qualities that make up a good leader: integrity, commitment to the mission, communication, intellectual curiosity and empathy. “I believe that building trust through consistent communication and maintaining that trust through transparency in real-time fosters an environment that makes an organization feel valued and critical to its mission and work,” she told FedScoop. At HUD, her top IT priorities are technology modernization, cybersecurity and continuing to provide excellent levels of customer service to partners and customers. Commenting on leadership lessons learned while in federal government, she said: “As a leader, if we keep the ‘why’ we do the work we do, keeping focused on ‘who’ we do the work for, then we can tap into the passion and momentum of ‘how’ to do the work.”

Dovarius Peoples has been responsible for all aspects of the Army Corps of Engineers’ information resource management and information technology operations since April 2019. “A great leader is one who understands how to find a balance between life and work. Caring for others is your most important responsibility,” he told FedScoop. In his view, the Army’s digital transformation journey consists of making the zero trust methodology and framework essential to securing its IT and Operational Technology environments. “Modernizing major business systems that enable us to deliver projects on time and within budget via cloud agnostic platforms will allow us to get massive amounts of data in the hands of our end users,” he noted. The CIO added that he deliberately works to inspire his team’s success through accountability. “I encourage the team to always ask for help when needed and as a leader I provide honest and constructive feedback,” he said.

Deputy CDAO for Digital Services, Department of Defense

As the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Services, now a directorate under the department’s new Chief Digital and AI Office, Katie Savage, née Olson, has learned that leadership cannot be done alone. “Leadership cannot rest on a single individual. Developing a vision, making and communicating decisions, and building a healthy culture are ideally a virtuous circle within a team: you make decisions in collaboration with your team; the collaboration makes it easy for everyone to understand and execute; the sense of ownership and empowerment consequently developed in your culture feed collaboration in the next set of decisions,” she told FedScoop. As an integral part in standing up the new CDAO office, Savage’s biggest priority ahead is “championing talent, tools and infrastructure.” She explained that her team is her biggest asset. “We cannot accomplish our CDAO mission of using data to create decision advantage without a deep bench of individuals and teams who know how to collect, manage, and use data.”

David Shive is no stranger to being a Best Boss in Federal IT. A repeat honoree on the annual list of top leaders in the federal IT community, Shive, the CIO of the General Services Administration, is focused on “delivering value and savings in real estate, acquisition, technology, and other mission-support services across government through secure and resilient technology solutions.” A big part of that comes in the push to modernize GSA’s cybersecurity through zero trust. “We are evolving from our traditional perimeter-based, compliance-oriented model to a Zero Trust Architecture that considers resources and access as fundamentally untrusted,” Shive told FedScoop in an email earlier this year. “By implementing [cybersecurity] modernization efforts, GSA will improve user experience through seamless global connection to GSA-managed environments and applications while maintaining ZTA principles. It will improve cybersecurity capabilities to continually verify the security of users, devices, applications, and data as well as achieve broad-based visibility across the GSA ecosystem with enhanced capabilities leveraging automation to manage and respond to threats in real-time.”

Actions speak louder than words, and it’s important leaders demonstrate to their workforce they care, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said. “Leaders need to show people that they care with their actions, not just their words,” he said. “Leaders show they care by providing their people with tools, guidance and support, creating a culture of trust, inclusion, diversity and transparency needed to accomplish the mission at hand. Leaders show they care by empowering their subordinates, enabling them to swiftly take the actions needed for mission success. At the end of the day, a leader has to set the vision, be committed to it, eliminate the roadblocks and set the environment to shine, while also being agile enough to change as the situation(s) dictate.” Good leaders also need to empower subordinates in order to cultivate an atmosphere of trust, providing guidance, support and training to enable success.

Head of Federal, Scale AI

Atop Mark Valentine’s list of qualities that make a good leader is a triad of key traits: integrity, authenticity, and a growth mindset. “It’s difficult to be an effective leader when you’re busy trying to be the smartest person in the room; a little humility goes a long way,” said Valentine, the head of federal for Scale AI. In serving the federal government in its journey to operationalize AI, Valentine has learned that success is not a zero-sum game, as many believe it to be. “Therefore, we should all focus on outcomes, bring people along and let them know they belong. When teammates are invested in the vision and the team, and feel like they belong, they will flourish,” he said.

VP of Public Sector & Health Care, Crowdstrike

Transparency is key to being a great leader, James Yeager, vice president of public sector and healthcare for Crowdstrike, told FedScoop. “I think some of the most critical qualities a leader can have is to always remain mission-focused, stay committed and passionate to whatever your ultimate end goal is, and partner with people that share your vigor for the mission and who inspire you daily,” he said. “One of the key ways to ensure you are aligned with your team and your internal partners is to operate with transparency. Open communication should never be marginalized or sacrificed.” As he dedicates his work to helping public sector agencies modernize their cybersecurity, he has learned “you can never stop learning, evolving and growing,” Yeager said. “Stagnation ultimately leads to failure. This is especially true in cybersecurity as the landscape around us is constantly shifting and the adversary is continually modifying their strategies and tactics. We must always stay one step ahead of them in order to protect our customers.”