Page 70 - Federal Computer Week, March/April 2019

2019 FEDERAL 100
Karen Wrege
CIO, Director of Defense Trade Controls
State Department
Cloud hopper. Wrege and her team are responsible for licensing the inter- national sale of weapons, but their technology systems were from the 1980s. She spearheaded a cloud-based modernization initiative to overhaul business processes, and all legacy systems will have been retired or con- solidated by the end of the year. The effort has already resulted in cost sav- ings of 60 percent. Thanks to Wrege’s leadership, the project “proved to State that you can have these pockets of excellence and deploy...citizen- centric delivery at a really rapid veloc- ity while still maintaining the security posture that an organization needs,” Regent Solutions President Byron Caswell said.
Renee Wynn
CIO
NASA
Making space for better tech.
When it comes to government IT, few jobs sound cooler than CIO of NASA. The highly decentralized space agency comes with plenty of challenges, however, and Wynn made remark- able progress on addressing them in 2018. NASA now posts a B-plus on the House Oversight and Reform Commit- tee’s Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecard — up from an F in 2016 — and Wynn has been a leader in the push for adoption of Technology Busi- ness Management methodologies. She
also chaired the American Council for Technology (the government half of ACT-IAC) and helped it evolve to better serve the government’s mission needs.
Amit Yoran
Chairman and CEO
Tenable
Cyber champion. Yoran has long embraced the role of educating public-sector leaders on the impor- tance of critical infrastructure protec- tion as part of an overall cyberse- curity strategy — not surprising for someone who was a founding mem- ber of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. In 2018, however, those efforts kicked into another
gear. He testified before Congress, conducted seminars and workshops, and worked personally with agencies across government to better address such vulnerabilities. Several agency executives said Yoran has been instru- mental in the Department of Home- land Security’s efforts to build a com- mon defense strategy that involves the public and private sectors in a joint cybersecurity posture.
Drew Zachary
Director and Co-Founder, The Opportunity Project, and Co-Director, Census Open Innovation Labs, Census Bureau
Commerce Department
Innovation matchmaker. With The Opportunity Project, Zachary has operationalized pulling in private-
sector experts to help agencies create digital tools to tackle critical mission challenges. Technology developers, data scientists and other special-
ists from industry, academia and the nonprofit world partner with gov- ernment teams for tightly focused design sprints. Zachary’s data-driven approach befits her parent agency,
but the effort’s impact is being felt
far beyond the Census Bureau. The recently completed TOP Health proj- ect, for example — a multiagency col- laboration that produced another 2019 Federal 100 winner — was developed directly from Zachary’s blueprint.
John Zangardi
CIO
Department of Homeland Security
IT wrangler. Zangardi has trans- formed DHS into one of the federal government’s top IT performers. Since moving to the agency from
the Defense Department in Decem- ber 2017, he has pushed the use of advanced cybersecurity technology, identity management capabilities, transformational telecommunica- tions plans, cloud computing and data analytics. His drive and enthusiasm for the work contributed to stabilizing the agency’s operational environment, making its email and networks func- tion reliably, and introducing innova- tive efforts such as secure mobility and cloud migration. He has also set the stage for adopting emerging tech- nology such as artificial intelligence, cloud automation, quantum comput- ing and 5G networks.
Karen Wrege Renee Wynn Amit Yoran Drew Zachary John Zangardi
70 March/April 2019 FCW.COM