Recap: Government CIO “Women Tech Leadership in Defense and National Security”
Welcome to eSimplicity’s newest blog series, “Recap!” Recap is a series launched by eSimplicity’s technical writing interns to summarize key points from tech industry events. From the very words of the most cutting-edge strategists in the government IT field, eSimplicity aims to keep readers up to speed with the latest trending topics and news.
It is no secret that national security is a topic of wide discussion and concern in this day and age. Amid several recent affairs such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the security of federal data is more imperative than ever. Simultaneously, women’s participation in the U.S. armed forces has been increasing exponentially through recent years with an exceptional amount of women’s leadership in agencies focused on national security.
In a special event last Thursday called “Women Tech Leaders,” GovernmentCIO hosted several bold women tech leaders who have each devoted their careers to breaking the boundaries of intelligence and defense preparedness. The panel of women gathered to discuss the importance of improving gender diversity across the national security field and shared their personal strategies and experiences as leaders in a COVID world.
Katie Olson, Acting Director at Defense Digital Service, kicked off the discussion by revealing that the number of women in the national security field has increased over recent months, adding how today is “an incredible time for technology,” as we are seeing “great representation by women in the field.”
“The women are coming in and taking leadership roles.”
Monica Farah-Stapleton, Technical Director at FEHRM, chimed in on how exciting it is seeing a large number of women in leadership positions recently with many women now a part of the everyday technical team. With more women on board, Monica explained the team has a new perspective in terms of problem-solutions.
When asked about their own accomplishments, all four women agreed their successes stem from a shared mission to “protect our freedoms and our fighters.”
In terms of being a leader amongst many team members, Katie explained the importance of making sure all of her team members are on the same page by talking in the same vernacular and “rising through the ranks” with tech enablement. As the world changes so rapidly because of pandemics and cyber-attacks, she is concurrently looking to bring more talent into the DOD in an effort to adapt accordingly.
What is technology’s role in leading today?
As for unique environment in which the DOD and its branches operate, Monica believes that technology is an enabler for a population to be able to do the job they need to do. However, in regards to the recent pandemic, leaders like Katie have had to leverage technology and use cybersecurity in a different way — one to their advantage. In a recent project with the NSA, Katie’s team was involved in the effort to safely deliver a new vaccine to the American people. This in turn meant ensuring companies had “good hygiene” from a cyber perspective so her team could trust the safety of the systems and the data being produced from vaccine development to the supply chain.
Cynthia Bedell, Director of Computational & Information Sciences at Army Research Laboratory, described Army’s efforts to “harness technology experts from across the country”.
Although her team started hiring remotely pre-COVID, when everyone went remote in March of 2020, the remote work environment surprisingly brought her teams closer together. With an even playing field — having everyone utilize the same digital space, there were no “haves or have nots” and employees across the board grew to interpret the power of telework and remote work.
As for the future of cybersecurity?
Katie expects to see more movement into industrial control systems, with a concentrated focus on how programmers are censoring data, analyzing it and making sense of it all. Considering recent cyber-attacks such as the O’Neill pipeline, she says agencies need to take a look at systematic things, as this censoring is not something that can happen in “individual end points” from users within an organization.
Monica added that COVID-19 forced her organization to make infrastructure changes due to the remote work environment. Therefore, a mass shift to the cloud is necessary in order to protect the exchange of data in the future.
Special thanks to Government CIO for hosting this wonderful and inspiring event. More perspective is always needed in the IT world — men and women included. To all interested in government work, make your move today!
Citations
Olson, Katie. “Government CIO: Women Tech Leaders.” July 22, 2021.
Farah-Stapleton, Monica. “Government CIO: Women Tech Leaders.” July 22, 2021.
Bedell, Cynthia. “Government CIO: Women Tech Leaders.” July 22, 2021.
