Page 82 - FCW, August 2021

G. Nagesh Rao
Acting CIO, Bureau of Industry and Security
Commerce Department
Cloud champion. For the first half of 2020, Rao was chief technologist at the Small Business Administra- tion, where he played a crucial role in helping the agency transition to telework and respond to coronavi- rus legislation that required SBA to rapidly distribute nearly $700 billion in loans and grants. He spearheaded the implementation of six new cloud- based systems to support the unprec- edentedly heavy demand from small businesses and lenders. He joined the Bureau of Industry and Security in June and immediately began work- ing to achieve Commerce’s enterprise IT goals by overseeing the migra- tion of critical systems to the cloud, establishing a DevSecOps framework and helping to consolidate tools and services.
Jim Richberg
Public Sector Field CISO
Fortinet Federal
A public/private partner. Richberg spent 2020 helping government and its private-sector partners address critical problems that ranged from improving election security to coping with the security and IT challenges posed by the pandemic. He also iden- tified key technologies for securely accelerating digital transformation in government and best practices that help agencies work more efficiently without sacrificing security in their
G. Nagesh Rao Jim Richberg
post-pandemic operations. He also proposed the creation of — and now leads — a multi-vendor working group that makes recommendations to the federal government on ways to help state, local, tribal and territorial governments more effectively address their ongoing cybersecurity needs.
Geo Saba
Chief of Staff for Rep. Ro Khanna
House of Representatives
Laying good-government ground- work. Saba spearheaded the effort to develop and pass the IT Moderniza- tion Centers of Excellence Program Act. This bill codifies the General Services Administration’s program to ensure that agencies can turn to the centers for technical assistance on topics such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing regardless of changes in administration. Saba was involved in all stages of the process. He proposed the idea, drafted the original bill and led the charge to have it passed in the House. The Senate fol- lowed suit swiftly because Saba took the time to sort out potential conflicts early, thereby ensuring unanimous support among senators.
Mark Santaw
CIO, Criminal Investigation Command
Department of the Army
The data wrangler. At the FBI’s request, Santaw came up with a way to use the bureau’s electronic criminal arrest disposition process to import data into the Next Generation Identifi- cation system for nationwide crimi-
nal background checks. Rather than reuse an Army-specific solution, he created a universally acceptable and cybersecurity-compliant tool named DSPE-Ingest. It is pre-coded with the necessary logic to convert, normalize and transpose data according to the FBI’s rigid format. Law enforcement organizations can now convert 10,000 offender entries in seconds, instead of the 15 minutes per entry of the previ- ous process. His approach has already saved FBI partners over 500,000 man- hours in manual records processing.
Gissa Sateri
Director
REI Systems Inc.
Getting acquisition down to a science. Sateri is the industry lead for an ACT-IAC project on innova- tive acquisition practices. Along with her government co-lead, she worked closely with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the General Services Administration to develop the Periodic Table of Acquisition Innovations — a knowledge-sharing tool that promotes awareness of innovative procurement practices across the federal government. As a result of Sateri’s efforts, agencies are now using “frictionless acquisition” practices such as down-selection of vendors based on preliminary submis- sions and criteria. To further ensure the project’s success, she persuaded REI Systems to develop a proof of concept at no cost to the government.
2021 FEDERAL 100
80 August 2021 FCW.COM
Geo Saba Mark Santaw Gissa Sateri