2015 Breaking the Status Quo Awards

Winners Announced!

The awards were be presented at the Federal Forum on June 17, 2015 following the networking lunch.

The 2015 Breaking the Status Quo Awards recognize thought leaders who have developed and operationalized innovative strategies, who think outside the box, aren’t afraid to shake things up and who continue to raise the bar higher. Their significant contributions in their IT innovation efforts set them apart from the "Status Quo."

Nominees are leaders who are breaking the status quo by implementing new innovative technologies, strategies and policies in their network such as...

  • Implementing Open Standards
  • Ensuring a multi-vendor network
  • Deploying fabric based technology
  • Leveraging SDN or NFV technologies

Federal Leadership Winners

Robert Karas,

Chief, DHS/NCCIC

Rob Karas is the chief of the National Cybersecurity Assessments and Technical Services (NCATS) team. His dedication and efforts to enhance operational cyber capabilities that allow DHS to better safeguard and secure cyberspace should be considered for this award. His team provides proactive, risk-based assessments to empower stakeholders to mitigate risks, close capability gaps, limit exposure and reduce exploitation. While the two technology services were once exclusively focused on federal networks, they are now available to state, local, tribal, territorial and critical infrastructure partners across the nation, which is now over 150 stakeholders to date.

William Walders,

CIO, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

The leadership demonstrated by William J. Walders, CIO of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Bethesda, has enabled the organization to embark on an IT transformation to improve financial transparency. Walders has led his team to create a well-defined service catalog of all IT services for the hospital and region. In addition, he ensures these well-defined services are delivered consistently – not only reducing risk and unexpected cost overages, but increasing service levels as well. This type of transformation aligns IT with clinician needs rapidly and effectively, which will ultimately improve patient care – a top priority for Walders.

Lt. Col Ahmed Williamson,

Project Management Branch Chief, Joint Staff, J6, DD IT, EMD

Lt. Col. Williamson is the driving force to transition all JS IT services to a common provider within the Pentagon. This effort is being leveraged as the pilot for transitioning more than thirty Pentagon tenant organizations into a single common IT service provider as part of a DEPSECDEF mandated efficiency review. This paradigm shift in customer support would create a joint base concept utilizing a single IT infrastructure, serving as a model for replication across the DOD. Lt. Col. Williamson is an excellent negotiator/arbitrator and someone who is able to bring together divergent command positions to solve a common objective.

Industry Leadership Winner

Steve Charles,

Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, immixGroup

Through the leadership of Steve Charles, Brocade® Network Subscription is now available as a part of immixGroup’s GSA Schedule. Government executives explain that they are locked in to recurring expenditures to the tune of billions of dollars that prevent them from investing in new technology. The O&M spend is increasing to maintain old equipment and old systems, and since 2009, government directives have been asking agencies to proactively manage IT as dynamic, just-in-time resources. By adding Brocade Network Subscription to its GSA schedule, immixGroup has built a program where you can upgrade network today out of operating funds to get you state-of the art technology. ImmixGroup’s GSA Schedule is risk free acquisition that allows agencies to procure exactly what they need today and limitlessly flex tomorrow.

Federal Leadership Nominees

Ron Broersma,

Chief Engineer, DREN/SPAWAR

Ron has been a long time advocate of IPv6 pushing vendors to put it on equal par to IPv4, thus paving the way for the inevitable migrating to an all IPv6 Internet. At the end of 2014, Ron challenged Brocade once again to focus more effort on preparing the world for IPv6. As a result, Brocade's TAC is now dual-stack in their lab to allow easy replication of IPv6 applications and interoperability. Additionally, Ron set up an SDN testbed in DREN to explore the New IP.

Richard Davis,

CTO, USGPO

In response to the White House’s strategy document, “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People,” Ric Davis established a shared service model for GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides secure management, preservation and digital signature authentication of electronic content for free access at fdsys.gov. Davis’ model extends infrastructure and capabilities to other agencies, lowering costs and reducing duplication across the federal government while benefitting the public by furthering transparency efforts and increasing the availability of federal data.

Dan DelGrosso,

Technical Director, PEO EIS, Dept. of Navy

Dan is being nominated for spearheading the Navy's new Innovation Cell. The Cell's goal is to capture industry best practices against various business/technical challenges that the Navy has. The expectation is that industry will not only drive the best solutions, but it will provide the criteria used to select a solution. The Navy has a one year timeline earmarked from the time they advertise an industry challenge through the selection process all the way to either a procurement or Navy DAA authorization for a solution to be used Navy-wide. The one year timeline is the initial time goal and they hope they can decrease that in the future.  Even at one year, they decrease the time from conception of a challenge to award by 6-12 months versus traditional procurements and certifications.

Jason Fairchild,

BIM Community of Practice Leader, USACE

Jason Fairchild never allows his vision for breakthrough policies and technology to be impeded by limitations—budget restrictions, inefficiencies and status quo mentality. When asked to sponsor the Autodesk FedRAMP accreditation process, Jason immediately agreed and then obtained leadership approval. His willingness to break the status quo will provide cloud technology benefits well beyond the USACE. Once the Agency Authority to Operate is issued from the USACE, it will suffice for use by other civilian and DOD agencies, as well as commercial organizations supporting them—a game changer for federal cloud efforts.

Dr. Steven Fellini,

Chief Cluster Architect, NIH

Dr. Steve Fellini is the chief architect of the large Biowulf Cluster at NIH. The NIH Center for Information Technology’s (CIT) Biowulf cluster is a great example of how federal agencies can benefit from consolidation and shared IT services. The cluster is based on an open standard operating environment leveraging a GNU/Linux parallel processing system designed as a shared resource. It is implemented using standards-based commercial off-the-shelf products from multiple vendors including networking products to provide NIH intramural researchers with a world-class system to assist in solving complex biomedical research problems.

Greg Garcia,

Executive Director, Pentagon ITA

In 2012 when the Pentagon started to evaluate an overhaul of its data center objectives within the construct of new federal IT guidelines, the solution was clear: to improve service agility, network integrity and lower five year lifecycle costs. Utilizing the Brocade Network Subscription acquisition solution, Pentagon was able to use OpEx funds for a complete enterprise wide asset deployment. This tech refresh effectively doubles their bandwidth, reduces the number of ports required, and most importantly, integrates leading edge fault and performance monitoring, all in one platform. Brocade Network Subscription gives the Pentagon complete control of their IT assets. The Pentagon is leading the way in delivering groundbreaking solutions to ensure IT investments best serve their DOD customers’ mission success.

Gregory Gould,

IT Operations Manager, INSCOM

Gregory Gould is not afraid to shake things up, and he repeatedly stands up for and recommends multi-vendor environments, ease-of-use fabric technologies and open standards-based architectures. In October 2014, Greg played the largest role at INSCOM in helping to convince his leadership, as well as leadership from other INSCOM organizations, to participate in a meeting with Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney to discuss the successes and challenges within the INSCOM-Brocade relationship. With his influence and leadership, Gould helped make Brocade a newly significant provider and partner in their network architectures at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Fort Gordon, Georgia, NGIC in Virginia, and other locations.

Kevin Greene,

Software Assurance Manager, DHS

Kevin Greene is challenging and changing the entire IT security industry to move from the network security status quo to the critical necessity of building secure software that truly protects our nation. Beginning with the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP), a multi-billion dollar collaborative environment that is revolutionizing the software assurance practices and activities needed to protect our 'software' world, Greene has brought academics, industry experts, government agencies, institutions and individuals from every part of the IT ecosystem (developers, security professionals, educators, and corporate executives) together to force this industry shift to truly protect the future of a software-driven world.

Kimberly Hancher,

CIO, EEOC

Kimberly Hancher is a tech-savvy federal executive with an impressive record leading government IT organizations. She is a key member of EEOC’s senior executive service (SES) working to eliminate discrimination in the workplace. At the EEOC she is a trusted technical strategist who has introduced several new technologies, policies, programs and strategies to transform agency operations. Infusing digital strategy alongside customer-focused Web based applications systems, she is focused on eliminating antiquated paper-based processes and reducing the administrative burden on agency knowledge workers. She is a bureaucracy buster who cuts through red tape, rises above administrivia and challenges the status quo.

Michael Henry,

Operational Research Analyst, Joint Staff J6, Architecture Division

Mr. Henry led the effort to develop, test and evaluate procedures to implement a special operations proven capability and rapidly migrated it to the XVIII Airborne Corps (solving top Army readiness issue) in June 1014 and the Marines in Nov. 2014. This capability was built using government and commercial off the shelf material and adaptive networking wideband waveform. It improved capabilities by increasing bandwidth to the aircraft by 1900 percent and provided the warfighter with enhanced voice, chat, common operational picture and ISR Full Motion Video.

Robert Karas,

Chief, DHS/NCCIC

Rob Karas is the chief of the National Cybersecurity Assessments and Technical Services (NCATS) team. His dedication and efforts to enhance operational cyber capabilities that allow DHS to better safeguard and secure cyberspace should be considered for this award. His team provides proactive, risk-based assessments to empower stakeholders to mitigate risks, close capability gaps, limit exposure and reduce exploitation. While the two technology services were once exclusively focused on federal networks, they are now available to state, local, tribal, territorial and critical infrastructure partners across the nation, which is now over 150 stakeholders to date.

Dr. Bryan Larish,

Technical Director, Enterprise Connectivity and Specialized IT Services, NSA

In his current role at the NSA, LArish is breaking the status quo by leading an effort to implement open networking using SDN in the enterprise as well as at the Campus Edge and OpenStack cloud environment. Like many large organizations, NSA is dealing with constraints on budget and manpower in the face of an ever-increasing need for agility and scale with an aging infrastructure. NSA is exploring open networking as a way to break the chokehold of hardware vendors. This initiative is challenging to say the least and involves coordination across many different organizations with both contractor and government personnel while maintaining focus on the mission.

George Moncrief,

Chief, ERDC DSRC

George is responsible for implementing the largest Ethernet fabric in the DOD marketplace. Through George's vision ERDC DSRC installed over 25 VDXs including VDX8770s. This foundation enables and prepared ERDC DSRC for SDN and NFV to secure application access and enablement. George is now leading ERDC DSRC to SDN NFV for replacing existing firewalls with a Brocade solution.

Sarah Nather,

Program Manager, US Army Information Technology Agency

Ms. Nather implemented a cutting-edge, multi-tenant development and testing solution for Pentagon customers. The Pre-Production Research Environment Program (PREP) provides users with an integrated, secure, dynamic platform where solutions can be evaluated, developed and tested. Users can dynamically create projects, provision workloads, generate virtual networks and automatically test solution functionality and performance to meet the ever-changing needs of the Pentagon tenants. Her unique approach combined state-of-the-art cloud technologies, network virtualization and multiple vendor packages into a converged architecture that provides “demonstration-as-a-service”, “development-as-a-service” and “testing-as-a-service” to the DOD community.

Maj. Joshua Rockhill,

Action Officer, JS J6 DD ITT EMD

Masterful execution in the performance of his duties as the action officer for Tanium implementation, Maj. Joshua Rockhill successfully planned, coordinated and managed the expeditious implementation of an IT tool that enhances J6's ability to employ security, network remediation, asset management and real-time status management procedures for the Joint Staff networks. Maj. Rockhill also created the Joint Staff ITEXCOM to analyze IT procurements and projects to ensure senior leadership is fully onboard and approving of actions. Charged to conduct a review of critical procedures nested within the overall JSIN Change Management Process, Maj. Rockhill thoroughly reviewed, analyzed and evaluated processes, identified problematic areas for concern, and developed recommendations for improvement.

Mark Schwartz,

CIO, USCIS/DHS

Schwartz is what we consider the ultimate disruptor — think lean, agile, and eliminate waste. As a visionary and out-of-the-box thinker, he makes others think and work differently and better. Schwartz has been working to drive the adoption of DevOps, lean and agile approaches across the federal government. His innovative procurement approaches for agile services has been widely admired by industry and peers in shaking up the standard IT organization and federal IT contracting. At USCIS he has instituted DevOps and continuous delivery approaches, moving major applications into the public cloud, introduced user-centric design for digital services with the MyUSCIS and ELIS (agency transformation) initiatives, and transitioned the agency to an open source software stack.

Lt. Col Patrick Suermann,

Construction Division Chair, Assistant Professor, USAFA

In the summer of 2014, the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) partnered with Autodesk to conduct a groundbreaking reality capture of the iconic USAFA Cadet Chapel. Lt. Col. Patrick Suermann headed the effort as Air Force project manager and sponsor. In one week, government civilians, officers, enlisted, cadets and contractors collected gigabytes of data using laser scanners and a UAV. For the first time, USAFA has a 3D digital model that represents the existing condition of this historic structure and enables unmatched visualization and simulation possibilities. Resulting surveys, models and simulations will be invaluable in planning a much-needed renovation.

William Walders,

CIO, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

The leadership demonstrated by William J. Walders, CIO of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Bethesda, has enabled the organization to embark on an IT transformation to improve financial transparency. Walders has led his team to create a well-defined service catalog of all IT services for the hospital and region. In addition, he ensures these well-defined services are delivered consistently – not only reducing risk and unexpected cost overages, but increasing service levels as well. This type of transformation aligns IT with clinician needs rapidly and effectively, which will ultimately improve patient care – a top priority for Walders.

Colonel Randy Wardle,

Chief, Coalition Branch, Joint Staff J6

Colonel Randy Wardle made significant and lasting contributions to the Department of Defense through his superior leadership and technical expertise while supporting the coalition C4 and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance interoperability efforts to enable global cyber war fighting capabilities across the combatant commands, services and agencies. Col. Wardle’s efforts were crucial to the success of the J6 efforts to integrate and synchronize policies, procedures, and processes in support of the warfighter. Col. Wardle managed the validation, prioritization and resourcing of over thirty operational warfighter requirements for improved and increased multinational information sharing capabilities related to sixty bi-lateral and multi-lateral network enclaves, including twenty-two capabilities classified as mission critical key networks and processes.

Martin Westphal,

Vice Director, J-6, Joint Staff

Mr. Marty Westphal demonstrated outstanding and sustained professional competence in the delivery of critical operational command, control, communications, computers, and cyberspace capability and IT innovation to the warfighter on behalf of the Joint Staff J6 and the operational community. His outstanding leadership, technical expertise, aggressive oversight and coordination with members of the Office of Secretary of Defense, Service Chiefs, and Defense Agencies were instrumental in providing requirements portfolio analysis, management review and capability validation across more than 2,300 information associated systems. His efforts to establish both Joint Information Environment and Mission Partner Environment operational architectures and capabilities will result in a flexible framework that provides strategic, operational and tactical flexibility for all commanders.

Stu Whitehead,

Deputy Director, C5 Integration, Joint Staff J6

Mr. Stuart Whitehead created the strategic vision and led the implementation of a powerful, innovative and game-changing cross-domain open source information-sharing framework for the Department of Defense. His innovative leadership resulted in breakthrough improvements for command, control, communication, computers and cyber capability development, including a DOD warfighter, business and intelligence IT architecture visibility and sharing portal, integration of command and control assessments into DOD cyber ranges, standardization of disparate XML-based information exchange implementations across the joint, interagency and mission partner environments, creation of friendly force tracking IT solutions, and development of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Core Data Framework.

Lt. Col Ahmed Williamson,

Project Management Branch Chief, Joint Staff, J6, DD IT, EMD

Lt. Col. Williamson is the driving force to transition all JS IT services to a common provider within the Pentagon. This effort is being leveraged as the pilot for transitioning more than thirty Pentagon tenant organizations into a single common IT service provider as part of a DEPSECDEF mandated efficiency review. This paradigm shift in customer support would create a joint base concept utilizing a single IT infrastructure, serving as a model for replication across the DOD. Lt. Col. Williamson is an excellent negotiator/arbitrator and someone who is able to bring together divergent command positions to solve a common objective.

Linda Winkler,

Sr. Network Engineer, Argonne National Laboratory

Ms. Winkler has been serving the Department of Energy for over 30 years at Argonne, and the larger Scientific/HPC community since 2001 in her capacity as the technical lead for routing and core infrastructure at the annual SuperComputing conference. Created each year, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports revolutionary applications and experiments. It serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications including supercomputing and cloud computing. Ms. Winkler has demonstrated industry-wide leadership for the HPC community by leading this annual, complex multi-vendor implementation for the benefit of the scientific community.

Industry Leadership Nominees

Steve Charles,

Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, immixGroup

Through the leadership of Steve Charles, Brocade® Network Subscription is now available as a part of immixGroup’s GSA Schedule. Government executives explain that they are locked in to recurring expenditures to the tune of billions of dollars that prevent them from investing in new technology. The O&M spend is increasing to maintain old equipment and old systems, and since 2009, government directives have been asking agencies to proactively manage IT as dynamic, just-in-time resources. By adding Brocade Network Subscription to its GSA schedule, immixGroup has built a program where you can upgrade network today out of operating funds to get you state-of the art technology. ImmixGroup’s GSA Schedule is risk free acquisition that allows agencies to procure exactly what they need today and limitlessly flex tomorrow.

Kim Hayes,

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, The Ambit Group

In 2014, Ambit, a SDVOSB-WOSB, generated over $33M in cost savings for the federal government. How? Through Kim Hayes's leadership in developing and executing our proprietary methodology of connecting technology and operational management to performance. At FEMA, we identified $10 million in telecommunications cost savings. At FCC, we run the multi-billion dollar broadband auction system, enabling the expansion of broadband access across the country. At NOAA, we are implementing a 10-year, $2.5 billion IT transformation that recovered over $23 million in IT operational costs. The result? Our government drives these savings into improved mission delivery and better government for the citizens.

Gary Peragallo,

Program Manager, HP

Gary Peragallo’s team successfully migrated an Army application to the Amazon Web Services GovGloud, supporting a Defense Department initiative to move mission support applications to the cloud. The Army selected the HP-managed Total Ammunition Management Information System (TAMIS) as a pilot application. Soldiers use TAMIS to forecast their ammunition requirements for wartime, training, and testing operations. Peragallo’s team began configuring the TAMIS training environment in October with the move completed on Nov. 14, six weeks ahead of schedule. With this pilot, the Army and HP showcased a successful application migration process and demonstrated the resiliency of the Army’s applications in the AWS GovCloud.

Lisa Wolford,

President & CEO, Constellation West

A woman leading in a male-dominated industry, Lisa Wolford, president and CEO of Constellation West, has been breaking the status quo in technology contracting for nearly 20 years. Last year, she spearheaded Department of Defense work to provide subject matter expertise from individual training through planning and execution of large force-level exercise events, as well as the integration of cyber into combatant commands’ mission areas. Additionally, as the founder of a SDVOSB/WOSB/SDB, she is an advocate for other women veterans by mentoring several who have started businesses and being a founding board member of At Ease USA and Final Salute.