Page 52 - FCW, July 2020

FirstPerson
THE EXIT INTERVIEW:
Essye Miller
DOD’s outgoing principal deputy CIO talks about COVID-19 and the state of the technology workforce
BY LAUREN C. WILLIAMS
Essye Miller, the first black woman to serve as the Defense Department’s principal deputy CIO, is retiring after a career spanning almost four decades. And although she has no immediate plan to pivot to industry, one thing is certain: developing the next generation of technology workers will be part of her future.
“Just like I turn around and talk to the youth of today, folks did that for me over the years,” Miller said. “To sit in the acting CIO chair or even sit in the CISO chair — it’s a tremendous opportunity for some ladies somewhere to say, ‘You know what? I can do it because I can see me in that.’”
“The cyber workforce has so many skills in it,” she added. “So I don’t have to be an engineer to be part of the cyber workforce. I could be a data scientist, I could be a programmer, I could be a budget person. It all goes back to the mission set and where we’re focused. And those are the kinds of conversations I think we’ve got to have.”
Miller has enjoyed a long and varied career, starting as an IT specialist at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama and rising into leadership roles in technology and communication before becoming director of cybersecurity for the Army CIO/G-6 and then moving to DOD’s CIO office.
She said she believes opportunities exist to bolster DOD’s technology workforce, particularly from within, “but what the rest of us have to do is shine a light on the opportunities that are there.”
Expanding diversity and inclusion
DOD has struggled to recruit and retain talented technology workers and to achieve racial and gender diversity and inclusion. It’s a problem that will persist after Miller leaves at the end of June unless the department changes the way it educates its workforce.
“I look at this as a total force issue, much broader than the department,” Miller said. “I think the challenge will be the education side — education with regard
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