National Archives CIO Sheena Burrell takes chief innovation role at FDIC

Sheena Burrell, the chief information officer of the National Archives and Records Administration, has taken a new job as chief innovation officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Burrell will join FDIC to lead its Office of Innovation — known also as the FDIC Tech Lab or FDiTech — on Dec. 2, an agency spokesperson confirmed to FedScoop.

Her last day at NARA will be Nov. 30, a National Archives spokesperson said.

In her absence, Gulam Shakir will serve as acting CIO “while we continue to plan for NARA’s digital transformation and future,” the NARA spokesperson said.

Burrell — a recent winner of a 2024 FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership award — has been CIO of NARA since August 2022, and for several years before that served as the agency’s deputy CIO. She has also held federal IT roles with NASA and the Social Security Administration.

During her tenure as CIO, Burrell’s focus has been on driving modernization and transformation of the National Archives, particularly through the digitization and protection of the nation’s records and recordkeeping systems.

She’s also overseen the agency’s strategy for responsibly adopting artificial intelligence to fulfill those missions. Notably, NARA this year issued a new strategic framework that emphasizes “building digital capacity, scalability, and responsibly embracing technological innovation,” largely with AI driving that.

“AI technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we work at NARA,” Burrell said in a released statement. “By automating routine tasks and providing us with new tools to analyze and understand our data, AI can help us to be more efficient, effective, and responsive to the needs of our customers.”

NARA’s AI use case inventory currently lists 11 uses or planned developments of AI across the agency, including tools to flag any personally identifiable information in digital archival records, automate data discovery and classification, and “improve efficiency and user experience in generative AI applications across NARA’s digital systems.”

A term member of the Technology Modernization Fund Board as well, Burrell has been an advocate for the program and in September 2023 described how NARA and other agencies had gotten creative in their approach to pay back money received from the TMF.

Joining FDIC, Burrell will inherit an innovation organization that has faced notable challenges in recent years.

Created in 2019 by then-Chairman Jelena McWilliams, the innovation office was meant to “collaborate with community banks on how to deploy technology in delivery channels and back office operations to better serve customers,” McWilliams said during a speech in October of that year.

But the vision for the office shifted when McWilliams left the agency. At roughly the same time that current Chairman Martin Gruenberg took over leadership of the agency in February 2022, then-Chief Innovation Officer Sultan Meghji abruptly resigned from the office, dismissing the FDIC as “hesitant and hostile” to technological change in a blistering op-ed published by Bloomberg News.

Meghji’s replacement, Brian Whittaker, confirmed later in 2022 that the agency’s innovation office had refocused its efforts on internal modernization to “be prepared to receive cryptocurrency and adopt new technologies. We want to be familiar with the technologies so we’re not caught on the back foot when crypto and others hit in a bigger fashion.”

That notable shift caught the attention of lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, who earlier this year penned a letter to Gruenberg sounding the alarm on his handling of the agency’s innovation portfolio, claiming that during his tenure “the FDIC has moved innovation backwards.”

“You have not only dismantled the external facing portion of the agency’s FDITech Office, which was focused on ‘engaging and collaborating with the private sector to support innovation that promotes economic inclusion, consumer protection, competition, and identification of risk,’ but shifted FDITech’s mission to focus solely on adoption of technologies within the FDIC,” said the letter, signed by Republican Reps. Patrick McHenry, N.C., Andy Barr, Ky., and French Hill, Ark.

Earlier this week, Gruenberg announced he will leave his post as chairman on Jan. 19, 2025, before the Trump administration takes office the following day.

Gruenberg, who had previously vowed to stay in the role, has faced calls from lawmakers for his resignation as recently as this week after an external investigation made public in May found that the “FDIC has failed to provide a workplace safe from sexual harassment, discrimination, and other interpersonal misconduct. It further found that management’s responses to allegations of misconduct, as well as the culture and conditions that gave rise to them, have been insufficient and ineffective workplace culture.”

A source familiar with FDIC’s internal planning told FedScoop that upon Gruenberg’s departure, Vice Chair Travis Hill will assume the role as acting chair and the innovation office will revert back to its original vision as a more external and forward-leaning organization engaging FDIC-supervised institutions.