Cyber Pros Receive Chief Info Officer Awards Cyber Pros Receive Chief Info Officer Awards

By Amaani Lyle

DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5, 2014 – The Defense Department’s top information management professionals received senior-level recognition for their expertise at the 2014 DoD Chief Information Officer Award ceremony held here yesterday.

Terry Halvorsen, DoD’s acting CIO, provided the event’s keynote remarks and presented the awards, given for exemplary performance in improving information delivery and dissemination, management capability, cost reduction and savings, a broad user base, process, and mission impact.

Global Nomination Process

Award recipients were selected from more than 100 nominations submitted worldwide.

Halvorsen delivered the keynote address in the place of Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall, due to a scheduling conflict.

A premier event, the DoD information technology award ceremony is now in its 14th year.

“Cyber and [information technology] offer us the opportunity to make big changes and solve some of the big problems we have,” Halvorsen said. “The awards are important, but it’s more about what [the awardees] did, and what they’ll continue to do.”

Halvorsen described the impact of the award from a broad perspective.

“Pick an area of business, and if the DoD isn’t No. 1 we’re in the top five,” Halvorsen said. “That’s an opportunity for us to do lots of amazing things and frankly drive businesses to do things we want to do and lower our cost.”

People, Teamwork Make Impact

Halvorsen acknowledged the ceremony’s attendees didn’t hear much about technology.

“You heard about people. Whether civilians or in uniform, [people] applying technology to help all of us … it took people and teams to do that,” Halvorsen said. “The DoD demonstrates as a whole that when it finally gets down to the time to do the operation, the teamwork gets it done and we continue to excel at that.”

This year’s DoD CIO Award recipients include:

Individual Awards

First Place: Martin P. Doebel, Strategic System Technical Manager/Chief National and Nuclear C4 Division, United States Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Doebel drove re-alignment of approximately $500 million to address vital system gaps.

Second Place: Col. Kevin D. Litwhiler, S-3 Brigade Operations Officer, U.S. Army, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. His tactical and technical savvy facilitated creative solutions across a vast IT footprint making him a “go-to” advisor as he synchronized operations of 42 network enterprise centers and directorates of information management.

Third Place: Daniel R. Pierson, Deputy Division Chief J6, United States European Command, Stuttgart, Germany. Pierson helped consolidate data centers and IT services through the adoption of enterprise solutions for business and mission applications.

Fourth Place: Markus E. Rogers, Director, Network Architecture, U.S. Air Force Network Integration Center, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. Rogers helped provide cradle-to-grave oversight in consolidating the Air Force's array of "stand-alone" networks, e-mail, and directory service environments into a single, centrally-managed Enterprise Network.

Team Awards

First Place: Heartbleed Team, National Security Agency. The team thwarted exploitation of a serious security vulnerability across the DoD’s global network of more than 8 million computing devices.

Second Place: Combined/Coalition Information Sharing Team, Joint Staff, Pentagon. This team assisted a multi-national migration of over 62,000 secure email accounts and developed multi-national approved policies and procedures for governance, change management and service operations management.

Third Place: Jordan Deployment Team, 51st Combat Communications Squadron, United States Air Force, Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. The team executed the fastest Tier 1 network install in United States Air Forces Central Command’s history and supported more than 1,000 joint warfighters, integrating an Air Expeditionary Group and an Army Air Defense Artillery Brigade.

Fourth Place: Secure Integration Cloud Team, Special Programs, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Pentagon. Their enterprise service efforts, through the Secure Integration Cloud, provided an unprecedented bridge between the execution and governance communities.