Chief Information Officer

“My imperative is to ensure that Warfighters have the right IT/cyber, secure communications equipment, and capabilities they need to execute their missions.”

      - Terry Halvorsen, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer

As the Principal Staff Assistant and senior Information Technology advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer is responsible for all matters relating to the Department’s information enterprise.

DoD is huge.  It has over 1.4 million active-duty men and women, 718,000 civilians, and 1.1 million National Guard and Reserve members. More than 450,000 of its employees are overseas. It also has several hundred thousand buildings and structures located in more than 5,000 different locations or sites, as well as more than seven million computers and IT devices.

DoD’s IT budget was nearly $40 billion in fiscal 2014, including almost $5 billion for cybersecurity.

And DoD is very mobile. This means that DoD picks up big chunks of its organization and networks, then puts them down in different places around the world. This type of mobility is required to help DoD defeat ISIL, train partner nations, accomplish humanitarian missions, and provide disaster relief.

The Department also regularly undertakes these missions with partners, some expected, some unexpected. So not only do DoD’s networks need to be mobile, but they need to be flexible – and secure enough for the mission. Finally, the Department’s IT is complicated – DoD is in almost every business you can imagine, like acquisitions, health, logistics, real estate, food distribution, and more.

 

 

 

DoD CIO is ensuring a more secure, efficient, effective DoD IT environment through its top priorities:

• Modernizing the networks – fielding the Joint Regional Security Stacks is the CIO's top priority
• Sharing with mission partners by establishing the Mission Partner Environment
• Reducing the cost of DoD IT through a review directed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense
• Managing DoD’s data by partnering with industry to migrate data to the cloud
• Defending against cyber attack is the CIO's highest cyber priority
• Empowering mobile data access through people and information across the Department
• Maximize Spectrum Access to Enhance Operational Effectiveness in an increasingly congested and contested environment

DoD CIO works with government, industry, and academia to achieve its top priorities. The opportunities page includes helpful resources like links to:

• Defense Industrial Base Cybersecurity / Information Assurance (DIB CS/IA) Program
• Enterprise Information Technology Business Case Analysis (BCA) template
• Information Technology Exchange Program (ITEP)

Please visit the DoD CIO Opportunities page here.

When appropriate, the DoD CIO is committed to sharing public information as broadly as possible, including policies about its top priority areas, as well as DoD’s IT budgets for last year, this year, and next year. Visitors will find helpful resources across the DoD CIO Website, and a concentrated collection of documents is available at the DoD CIO Library. Please click here to visit the Library.