The Education Department lost two top technology executives this week. The Department of Health and Human Services filled three key technology roles. And the Office of Personnel Management made quick work to name a new permanent chief information officer.
These are just a few of the big personnel changes in the federal IT community. And this isn’t even counting the 10 or so CIOs who are leaving this week when their political appointments comes to an end.
Let’s start with the Education Department changes. It may be a case of the time of the year. New year, new start. It may be a case of executives looking for new opportunities with all the threats about “shutting down” the Education Department by the incoming administration. Or, it may be a case of a new CIO wanting their own people in key positions. Thomas Flagg came over to Education in October. Or, may be there is something more going on that we don’t know about.
No matter the reason, Education has two big holes to fill with Steven Hernandez, the agency’s chief information security officer, moving to the U.S. Agency for International Development to be its deputy CIO and CISO. And Brian Bordelon, Education’s deputy CIO, moving to the Commerce Department to be its chief technology officer and deputy CIO.
Hernandez, who also is the vice chairman of the CISO Council, is joining his old boss Jason Gray, the USAID CIO, who was Education’s top technology executive for more than six years. Gray joined USAID in August 2022.
“While I am thrilled about this next chapter, it is bittersweet to leave a team I hold in such high regard,” Hernandez wrote in an email to staff, which Federal News Network obtained. “You have risen to every challenge and proven yourselves to be, in my opinion, the best cybersecurity team in government. Together, we have tackled some of the most complex cyber challenges in the world, and you have never let me down. It has been both a privilege and an honor to serve as your leader, and I am incredibly proud of all we have accomplished.”
Hernandez’s first day at USAID was Monday.
Hernandez was the Education CISO for more than seven years and previously worked at HHS.
During his tenure at Education, he oversaw the agency’s move toward zero trust with a recent focus on orchestration and automation.
Bordelon’s departure was a little more surprising. He had been deputy CIO only since August and been with Education for a little more than 18 months.
But he’s joining Commerce as Brian Epley, the agency’s new CIO, creates his own team of executives.
Bordelon, who also worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Department and the Army, helped the Education Department modernize its delivery of cloud services through its Pivot H hosting contract.
“That allowed us not just a reduction in what we’re spending or what we’re charging our different operating centers, but it’s also given us the opportunity to move to a model where we have more flexibility and more scalability,” Bordelon said before he left on Ask the CIO. “Our customers can choose if they want to use AWS or if they want to use Microsoft’s Azure. On the qualitative side, it gives them the ability to build things in those clouds. And as we talk about data integration and as we talk about artificial intelligence and other future and emerging technologies, we’re just in a better place.”
Bordelon said one of Education’s top priorities for 2025 is to continue to modernize the Ed.gov website and improve its user experience.
“A shout out to the whole team and what we’ve done is we’ve changed the governance model of how it’s done. Rather than having IT folks run this, they’ve built it, but the content is managed by the offices, so the governance has changed, so it’s more agile, more user friendly and standardized across the board,” he said.
While Education is looking to replace two technology executives, OPM and HHS filled key holes.
At OPM, Melvin Brown steps up to become the permanent CIO, replacing Guy Cavallo, who retired after 23 years in government on Jan. 10.
Brown has been OPM’s deputy CIO since January 2021, following Cavallo over from the Small Business Administration.
Additionally with Brown ascension, James Saunders, OPM’s CISO, becomes the new deputy CIO and Danielle Rowell is the new acting CISO. She has been the agency’s chief of cyber engineering since November 2022.
During his tenure as deputy CIO, Brown has helped OPM manage its costs in moving to the cloud. OPM recently completed a two-year sprint to move more than 50 applications and systems off premise. Now OPM has 90% of all of its applications in the cloud.
“Now our focus over the next couple of years is going to be around modernization and optimization. How do we get the max that we can out of our cloud investment? How do we optimize at scale? And then how do we reimagine or modernize our applications with a focus on AI and envisioning what that application will look like now as we reimagine that in an AI environment,” Brown said in a recent interview with the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “We had to get things into the cloud so that we can take advantage of cloud services. And so now that we in the cloud, we can now take advantage of services that we could not have taken advantage of when we were in an operating environment.”
Brown inherits a $280.8 million IT budget, according to the Federal IT Dashboard.
Of that, more than $184 million is considered operations and maintenance (O&M) and 16 out of 52 investments are considered a moderate or high risk.
Over at HHS, the new office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy filled three key roles as part of the reorganization kicked off last summer.
HHS recently named:
Rouault comes to HHS after spending the last three years with the U.S. Digital Service where she worked on two big efforts around modernizing unemployment insurance and leading the facing financial shock portfolio.
“Together we’ll be building out a new Office of the Chief Technology Officer at HHS, charged with leading HHS’ digital strategy and digital services for HHS programs, developing HHS data policy, anticipating emergent technology and data needs, and coordinating innovation across HHS programs to encourage experimentation, R&D and adoption of new technology,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
Honey returns to the role of CDO in some respects. She was acting CDO and executive director of data operations from 2019 to 2020. She also has been working other data-centric roles at HHS since 2020, including the lead data scientist for HHS’s InnovationX and COVID-19 Diagnostics Informatics working group.
Dierks returns to government after about a 15-year absence. She served from 2006 to 2009 as a fellow with HHS and the Food and Drug Administration working on an assortment of public health and risk mitigation projects.
She comes to HHS after being the chief data officer at Komodo Health for the last five years, where she spearheaded the development and evaluation of AI-powered healthcare analytics tools for life sciences companies, healthcare practitioners and patient advocacy groups.
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