The Department of Defense announced the recipients of the 2014 DoD Chief Information Officer awards at a Pentagon ceremony Dec.4. This year marked the 14th anniversary of the DoD CIO Award, the highest honor recognized by the department for exceptional achievement in the areas of information resource management, information technology, and cybersecurity.
Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall delivered the keynote address. "AT&L is the driving force as DoD purchases and integrates new technologies," said Acting DoD Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen. "Our close relationship is vital to driving IT innovation across the department, as exemplified by the achievements recognized here today."
More than 100 nominations were submitted worldwide, including civilian government employees and military. The award winners were chosen because of their performance in improving information delivery and dissemination, management capability, cost reduction and savings, a broad user base, process, and mission impact.
Team awards were presented to:
First Place: Heartbleed Team, National Security Agency. Their efforts resulted in a means to stop attempts to exploit a security vulnerability across the department's global network of more than eight million computing devices.
Second Place: Combined/Coalition Information Sharing Team, Joint Staff, Pentagon. The team assisted a multi-national migration of over 62,000 secure email accounts and developed multi-nationally approved policies and procedures for governance, change management, service operations management, and scheduled change advisory boards.
Third Place: Jordan Deployment Team, 51st Combat Communications Squadron, United States Air Force, Robins Air Force Base, Georgia. Their efforts resulted in the fastest Tier 1 network install in United States Air Forces Central Command's history and extended services to three sites, supporting more than a thousand joint warfighters, fully 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, Washington, District of Columbia. Their efforts, through the secure integration cloud , provide enterprise services to bridge the execution and governance communities for the first effort in the department's history.
Individual awards were presented to:
First Place: Martin P. Doebel, Strategic System Technical Manager/Chief National and Nuclear C4 Division, United States Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. He drove re-alignment of approximately $500 million to address vital N2C4 gaps including development of the solution to a pending missile warning funding gap.
Second Place: Army Col. Kevin D. Litwhiler, brigade operations officer, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. His tactical and technical acumen allowed for creative solutions across a vast IT footprint making him a "go-to" advisor for several echelons of his signal regiment while synchronizing the 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. He helped the European theater maximize its IT resources through the consolidation data centers and IT services, and 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, Ilinois. He supervised cradle-to-grave oversight of complex and diverse projects to consolidate the Air Force's array of stand-alone networks, e-mail, and directory service environments into a single, centrally-managed enterprise network.
For more Defense Department news, go to www.defense.gov/.