Energy.gov

Hear from one of DOE's own: Emily Knouse tells her story about how the Energy Department has changed over the years.

The Obama Administration’s Digital Government Strategy provides a vision for a 21st century government that lays a strong foundation for modernizing technology services across the Federal Government. At Energy, we’re implementing a three-pillar approach -- Transform, Protect and Advance – as part of this broader strategy, driving more secure, cost-effective, and efficient IT infrastructure and services.

The last 18 months have seen great improvements in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) information technology and cybersecurity. A major factor in our success is our alignment with the 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal Information Technology Management to move to a “Cloud First” environment and maximize the use of shared services to reduce costs and improve IT delivery.

The Energy Department, inspired by the idea of creating a centralized hub for collaboration and information, launched its own internal wiki ­ Powerpedia ­ two years ago today.

The Electric Sector Cybersecurity Risk Maturity Model Pilot is a new White House initiative led by the Department of Energy to develop a model to help us identify how secure the electric grid is from cyber threats and to test that model with participating utilities.

Earlier this month, the Department of Energy Office of the Chief Information Officer held a TechStat session of its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) program, which provides digital certificates for Department employees and advances the ability to share information in a secure manner with our internal and external stakeholders.

As Chief Information Officer for the Department of Energy, my role is to bring together internal IT resources, National Laboratories and strategic partners inside and outside of the Department to promote agency-wide innovation and effective operations that provide tangible, positive high value outcomes for the nation. At the Department of Energy Office of the Chief Information Officer, we are “breaking the cycle and moving forward” by transforming the Department’s IT strategy to enable the mission through strategic governance, responsive IT, and risk-based cybersecurity.

The OCIO established a Department-wide wiki, Powerpedia, in early 2010 to help facilitate knowledge capture, collaboration, and increased efficiency. Leveraging many of the lessons learned from the intelligence community’s Intellipedia effort, the Department implemented Powerpedia to increase the level of transparency and connect people and information together. Built on the same open source software underpinning Wikipedia, called MediaWiki, the Department is rapidly building a large corpus of information that is enabling the organization to "know what it knows".

Energy continues to define Phase II of the STAR METRICS program, a collaborative initiative to track Research and Development expenditures and their outcomes. Visit the STAR METRICS website for more information about the program.

In an effort to improve the performance of one of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) major IT investments, an agency TechStat review was recently held. The session focused on the Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) Program, a holistic approach for department-wide initiatives that support access to Federal IT systems and facilities. Fifteen DOE staff participated in the review, including program office representatives.