Interview with Dave Wennergren, Deputy CIO of DoD

I had the good fortune to meet with Dave Wennergren, the Deputy CIO of the Department of Defense recently. Dave also serves as the Vice Chair of the Federal CIO Council. I met him when he was working as Deputy CIO for the Department of the Navy, when I was working on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) program. Dave is an energetic and enthusiastic person the DoD is lucky to have as a career IT executive. He’s a strong advocate of government adopting industry best practices and leveraging new capabilities to improve mission effectiveness. His long held reputation as an agent of change will serve him well with the new administration. Here are a few pearls of wisdom and insight from Dave:

• “The change pace must be dramatically faster or we will risk becoming dramatically irrelevant.”
• He’s a fan of managed services and would like to see the government embrace more of it.
• Information sharing is a must. We can’t build walls. We have to figure out to how to share securely in a Web 2.0 environment.
• He’s an advocate of measuring the effectiveness of information sharing and solutions that include measures to gauge effectiveness.
  

It’s refreshing to speak with an IT executive eager to leverage new capabilities to improve mission effectiveness but pragmatic about measuring that progress in an objective fashion. It was clear Dave has adopted several tools Karen Evans successfully employed as the OMB CIO. We’re fortunate to have him as a source of continuity as the administration changes.