Announcing the winners of the 2022 FedScoop 50

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

Nearly four decades into his career as a federal official and technology executive, Sonny Bhagowalia has spent the past three years leading a $1.8 billion IT portfolio for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In the role of chief information officer at that agency, he has enhanced the nation’s security through innovation, intelligence, collaboration, and trust. In this role, Bhagowalia oversees a staff of 2,200 federal employees and 3,900 contractors to support CBP’s 24-7 mission. Before this, he spent three years as CIO of the Treasury Department and had a short stint as a senior adviser on tech and cyber with the Bureau of Fiscal Service.

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

As the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for the last year and a half, Jen Easterly has overseen a major transformation in the way the federal government protects its networks — namely through the adoption of zero-trust security practices and better management of its software supply chain. Earlier this year, Easterly and CISA launched a campaign called “Shields Up” through which the agency and its partners aim “to help individuals and organizations defend against cyber intrusions, particularly from Russia.” In an op-ed on CyberScoop, Easterly wrote: “With each of us playing our part, we can make it so that our adversaries will have to beat all of us to beat one of us.”

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger has a laser-focused vision to transform the Department of the Air Force’s IT. In August, her office issued a “CIO strategy” meant to hone the department’s IT efforts through fiscal 2028 across six lines of effort: accelerate cloud adoption; future of cybersecurity; workforce; IT portfolio management; excellence in core IT and mission-enabling services; and data and AI. “This was our effort to publicly go to the next level of detail and say where are we throwing our money and our time and our focus and our effort, and where do we want industry and our community to also focus,” Knausenberger said then. “We’re at the point where we really have to execute and we have to block and tackle, and we have to be able to operate very, very effectively.” In the past year, she’s also been a champion for the personnel who have pushed the Department of Defense to deliver basic computing capability through the “Fix Our Computers” saga. “The department has gotten much more serious about replacing end-of-life equipment, and really cyber hygiene in general,” she said. “Culturally, we’re taking this a lot more seriously.”

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

For the past two years, Anne Neuberger has served the White House and the Biden administration as the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, in large part leading the National Security Council’s prioritization of cybersecurity as a top issue. Just recently, Neuberger and the NSC announced a new consumer products cybersecurity labeling program intended to improve digital safeguards on internet-connected devices similar to the Energy Star program. This year, Neuberger has also made elevating cybersecurity a top-tier priority with NATO and with international partners, notably focusing on “deterring, disrupting, and responding to further Russian aggression against Ukraine, neighboring states, and in our respective countries.”

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

During his time as chief information officer of the Department of Defense, John Sherman has overseen major shifts in the department’s IT portfolio, notably in the move to the cloud, the adoption of a zero-trust security architecture and software modernization. In a recent op-ed for DefenseScoop, Sherman explained the need to get IT modernization “right” for the DOD. “This is a multi-layered challenge that extends from the top of the enterprise all the way down to the post/base/installation level, but it is one that my peers and I are determined to get right,” he said. “It is this user community, both in and out of uniform, who constitute our customer base and why we come to work every day. We have no higher obligation than to get all of this right for them.”

Golden Gov: Executive of the Year

Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer Aaron Weis has spent the past year highly focused on modernizing the Navy’s approach to cybersecurity by “pivoting from a compliance mindset to a dynamic model rooted in the philosophy of readiness and currency.” This plan, called Cyber Ready, is backed by a strategic intent memorandum from the secretary of the Navy. “Our assertion is that an approach more rooted in how the military views the problem of readiness is a better approach than compliance. Readiness is a wide aperture look at the state of staffing, training, supply chain and logistics that commanding officers strive for every day. Applying this Cyber Ready approach can use the same mindset to solve for the problem of cybersecurity. Cyber Ready is a better way to strengthen the Navy’s cybersecurity.”

Federal Leadership

As the Department of Defense moves to install a new cybersecurity program for defense industrial base partners through the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Stacy Bostjanick has been the change agent leading this effort on behalf of the DOD and its Office of the CIO. While Bostjanick has been working tirelessly to prepare the DIB for this inevitable shift, the hard work is really ahead of her and the department as the CMMC interim rule is set to launch next spring, and then DOD will start to hold contractors accountable for meeting a baseline of cybersecurity requirements when handling its controlled unclassified information.

Federal Leadership

Guy Cavallo has now been the chief information officer of the Office of Personnel Management for going on two years. During that time, he has prioritized driving digital transformation within the agency, notably by shifting the agency’s security architecture to a zero-trust model and delivering better digital services for OPM’s federal customers. The agency in late 2021 received money through the Technology Modernization Fund to support its zero-trust journey and Cavallo said that made it easier to take the steps needed to get OPM where it needed to go for better cybersecurity. “We were going to do zero trust even without that money,” Cavallo told FedScoop this year. “It just would’ve taken me longer because — you know the budget cycle in government — I inherited a budget when I got to OPM that had been decided two years earlier without zero trust.”

Federal Leadership

Department of Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer came to the agency at a time when it has been challenged to roll out the besieged electronic health record system. DelBene has been responsible for not only working to right that ship but also to deliver digital transformation across the greater VA enterprise by “getting back to basics.” He told FedScoop earlier this year what he’s learned in the role so far in developing a vision for transformation: “All of the work that we do needs to accrue to a core vision of what we’re trying to deliver for veterans themselves and key stakeholders in the VA.”

Federal Leadership

As the Deputy Director of CIA for Digital Innovation, Jennifer Ewbank is the agency’s chief digital officer, overseeing the CIA’s chief information officer and other key tech roles, and is responsible for accelerating the development and integration of digital and cyber capabilities across all of CIA’s mission areas, including enterprise IT, cybersecurity, cyber operations and analysis, data strategy and artificial intelligence, open source collection and reporting, and much more. “Risk is the defining characteristic of the CIA,” Ewbank said recently. “If the CIA cannot manage risk, the CIA cannot be the CIA,” she said of her job in the cyber and digital space.

Federal Leadership

The department of the Navy has been doing more to use data as a strategic asset, and Chief Digital Innovation Officer Mike Galbraith has been at the lead of that effort for the service. He recently told FedScoop recently everything the Navy does regarding IT is “all about the data.” He continued: “Moving data via our networks and transports, whether it’s with 5G, wide-area networks, other cellular capabilities; storing the data in the cloud; processing the data with quantum computing — it’s all about the data.” And all of those efforts, he said, will be foundational to creating an environment that supports next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Federal Leadership

Department of Homeland Security Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen spoke recently at FedTalks about the array of work he’s driving at the department. At the top of his priorities was a hiring spree as the agency looks to bring in further product management, customer experience and design expertise in support of the Biden administration’s recent customer experience executive order. Along with that, Hysen told FedScoop, because DHS interacts with more members of the American public than any other federal agency, it has really “embraced” the intent of the EO. “We’ve made this a top priority to modernize our services and improve those experiences.”

Federal Leadership

As the principal cyber adviser for the Department of the Air Force, Wanda Jones-Heath always has cyber on her mind. And a major part of that is bringing fresh, new cyber talent to the Air Force to support its expanding mission in cyberspace. “You need the people,” Jones-Heath said earlier this year. “The human piece will always be there … If you don’t have that human that understands what’s really going on, then you’re going to be behind the 8 ball when it comes to cybersecurity … I can’t do anything I want to do without that human interaction.”

Federal Leadership

Michael Madsen is no stranger to federal leadership, having served as the deputy director and director of strategic engagement for the Defense Innovation Unit since 2018. But recently, he took that leadership to the next level, assuming the role of DIU’s acting director when Mike Brown, his former boss, stepped down in the early fall. Now, Madsen is helping lead the search for the next DIU director with Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. At the same time, he remains focused on leading DIU’s mission of accelerating the adoption of commercial technology for defense and national security.

Federal Leadership

Karl Mathias joined the Department of Health and Human Services as its chief information officer in March, the eighth such person to take the role in the past seven years. Mathias brought with him to the role a deep background in senior federal IT leadership roles as CIO of the U.S. Marshals Service, and other senior IT roles at the Pentagon, including as deputy director of headquarters Air Force information management. In the early going, Mathias has been focused on departmentwide IT strategy and aligning the work of HHS’s many component CIOs, as well as boosting the department’s cybersecurity and recruiting talented technologists to serve at HHS.

Federal Leadership

Andre Mendes has been a beacon of leadership for the Department of Commerce since April of 2020, overseeing an IT budget of nearly $4 billion across the department and its bureaus. In August, going into the new fiscal year, Mendes shared his top priorities with FedScoop, which include the evolution and journey to zero-trust security, unifying the IT strategy of the bureaus across the department, and better recruiting and retaining IT talent to support this innovative work the department is focused on. With that latter point, in particular, Mendes said recently the shortage of cyber talent has created a sort of talent war within the federal government, where agencies often are forced to “poach” IT professionals from each other.

Federal Leadership

Danielle Metz has spent much of 2022 leading the charge in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to drive a digital enterprise transformation for all OSD components. Metz was recently named director of the Information Management and Technology directorate in OSD, working with the office’s new CIO Michael Donley to focus on “identifying and integrating IT requirements across Principal Staff Assistants, speaking with a unified voice in coordinating OSD IT requirements with the Joint Service Provider, and providing for regular cybersecurity and technology updates.” At CyberTalks in October, Metz said her biggest focus in the early going to establish that IT enterprise for OSD is developing a governance structure.

Federal Leadership

Paul Puckett, director of the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency since 2019, is an advocate for innovation in the Army, the Department of Defense, and the federal government. In 2022, his agency has made huge strides to support the Army’s enhanced adoption of cloud and plans to launch a new $1 billion cloud procurement. “We think ubiquitous and global access to compute and storage is really paramount for the amount of information we’re generating today in order for us to be able to get access to information, make sense of that information, and then make decisions at the speed of need when it comes to fighting and winning wars,” Puckett told DefenseScoop recently.

Federal Leadership

As a senior IT leader with nearly 30 years in the federal government and other private sector technology roles, Bobby Saxon has served a variety of missions, most recently as the deputy CIO of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, supporting the agency’s ongoing IT modernization and cybersecurity efforts. Prior to that, he spent three years at the health care insurance agency as director of CMS’s Office of Emergency Preparedness & Response Operations, a role that was key during the agency’s early response to the coronavirus. He also spent time during his career serving the Army as assistant deputy CIO for operations and plans.

Federal Leadership

Renata Spinks is the foremost cybersecurity leader in the U.S. Marine Corps as the assistant director for IC4 and chief information security officer of the military service. Though cyber is her biggest focus, Spinks is a major advocate for the move to the cloud and enhanced data sharing, both of which she told FedScoop drive better cybersecurity outcomes. “It was so necessary to take a look at industry and see what kind of commercial opportunities do we have to migrate our data to the cloud,” she said in early 2022. “We took it from a perspective of security, but also there’s a fiscal area of focus where we were looking at efficient ways of spending funds…”

Federal Leadership

Eileen Vidrine is well known in the federal technology community for her leadership as chief data officer of the Air Force. But in January, she was tapped by the Federal CIO Clare Martorana to be her senior strategic adviser for data. “I was honored to be asked by our Federal CIO … to lead data innovation at a federal level,” Vidrine said on FedScoop’s Let’s Talk About IT podcast. “This is really an opportunity to leverage the lessons learned and the proven state-of-the-art practices of bringing together data experts with our functional leaders to drive what I call data insights into that decision-making process. Tactical to strategic, it’s all about the art of the possible and then scaling data-driven decisions across the federal government.”

Industry Leadership

Rob Carey, former Department of the Navy CIO and Department of Defense Principal Deputy CIO, leads the public sector team at Cloudera Government Solutions. Recognizing that digital transformation, cybersecurity and the hybrid data movement are of ultimate importance to accelerate objectives in the federal government, Carey uses his over three decades of federal experience to deliver solutions supporting federal agencies’ mission success. He supports Cloudera’s customers across the U.S. public sector by providing technology solutions and insights that allow the respective agencies to navigate data-driven challenges and work to meet mission-critical objectives.

Industry Leadership

Cameron Chehreh serves as a trusted advisor to the government helping it to modernize, digitally
transform and unlock the value of existing IT investments — all with a laser focus on the mission.
Chehreh and his team help their clients to reimagine their IT capabilities on-prem, off-prem, in
the cloud, and at the edge. He works closely with customers across civilian and defense
agencies to deliver a higher level of citizen service and keep ahead of near-peer adversaries.
Chehreh also serves as an evangelist for the importance of U.S.-based semiconductor
production and a resilient supply chain.

Industry Leadership

As federal vice president for Proofpoint, Phil Fuster works tirelessly to provide federal agencies with mission-critical cybersecurity and modernize their network defense in line with the recent cybersecurity executive order. Fuster is a trusted advisor that understands federal priorities and the need for visibility across the threat landscape, driving with leadership that values three things: being intelligent, supportive, and kind. In particular, Fuster is a champion for Proofpoint’s people-centric approach to risk mitigation at scale.

Industry Leadership

Katy Mann, vice president of federal for Okta, is pioneering efforts to drive the adoption of zero trust, multi-factor authentication, and modern citizen services while securing the identities of 24+ million federal workers and citizens. In partnership with Mann’s Okta team, agencies are moving from processing paper and expensive legacy technologies to secure digital services aligned with the Biden administration’s customer experience and cybersecurity executive orders. Mann’s team is helping a DOD agency secure the identities of 5 million personnel through MFA and unifying 200+ applications in the cloud. Mann has also supported the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in providing equitable healthcare access to vulnerable communities. Her team helped build the cloud-based Quality Payment Program; today, 15% of Medicare claims are submitted via Okta-enabled API.

Industry Leadership

Max Peterson last year stepped into the role of vice president of worldwide public sector for Amazon Web Services with more than 30 years of experience focused on providing cutting-edge technology solutions to the government, healthcare, education and nonprofit sector. During his tenure in this role, Peterson has helped lead AWS’s efforts to launch a healthcare accelerator and a health equity initiative, the cloud company’s advancement in the space sector, and the introduction of DoD Cloud Infrastructure as Code for AWS to “help defense mission owners build out secure and scalable cloud environments faster.” 

Industry Leadership

A retired naval officer and CIO, Juliana Vida has seen the government’s technology challenges firsthand and uses her expertise to inspire customized solutions for agencies at Splunk. She provides consistently innovative and provocative thought leadership and opens the door for richer, art-of-the-possible discussions about a data-driven future. With first-hand familiarity with leaders’ data challenges, she encouraged modern, creative approaches leading to smarter solutions that better serve citizens. Always putting the government customer first, she projects authority and builds trust, inspiring new thinking on how advanced data gathering, analytics, and automation solutions can make a real difference to government missions.

Most Inspiring Up & Comer

As Chief Data Officer at Census, Zachary Whitman has been sharing his vision to unlock the wealth of data about the nation’s population/economy through one of the government’s largest data portals in a modernized and easy-to-use way. He’s emphasized the importance of the user by grounding improvements in research and feedback from wide-ranging customer groups. The platform’s innovation continues through Whitman’s strategic plan to include features like customizable tables/map views, data visualizations, and solutions developments with open API. His focus on providing trustworthy public information has pushed our teams to consider Census data in ways that are exciting, and most importantly, usable.