Michael Conlin will serve as the Department of Defense’s first chief data officer, a DoD spokesperson confirmed to Federal Times Aug. 22.
“The fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act made the chief management officer responsible for providing the availability of common, usable, departmentwide data sets and transparency of enterprise data,” the spokesperson said.
“The chief data officer will lead the extraction and analysis of data to support business reform and audit recommendations on behalf of the chief management officer and will lead the operation of a departmentwide data governance to oversee the preparation, extraction and provision of data throughout the business enterprise.”
RELATED
Though Conlin’s prior work experience is in the private sector, he’s no stranger to federal IT, and is well-versed in the broad scope and complexities of DoD’s enterprise IT requirements and challenges.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Conlin worked with both the DoD and Department of Homeland Security to refine the agencies’ IT strategies while at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services from 2013 to 2016. He also served as chief technology officer at DXC, a merger between HP Enterprise Services and Computer Sciences Corporation, and as CTO and vice president at Perspecta, a DXC spin-off with Vencore and KeyPoint Government Solutions.
Perspecta, through the merger and spin-off, currently holds the Navy’s $3.5 billion Next Generation Enterprise Network contract as well as any extension agreements awarded before the Navy moves ahead with the contract’s re-compete, expected this year. Conlin also held leadership roles in EDS, HP Enterprise Service’s former subsidiary and the original vendor on the Navy’s first Navy-Marine Corps Intranet contract, to which NGEN was the follow-on. Perspecta is expected to be a prime contender for the NGEN re-compete, which will continue to serve more than 700,000 users.
Conlin started work as chief data officer July 30.
Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.
