Leslie Beavers, who also served as acting DOD CIO for a period at the end of the Biden administration and during the early days of the second Trump administration, will step down as DOD principal deputy CIO at the end of September.

“The Office of the CIO would like to congratulate Principal Deputy DoD CIO Leslie Beavers who announced today that she will be stepping down from her position at the end of September after more than 30 years of uniformed and civilian service,” reads a LinkedIn post from the DOD CIO’s office. “From projects such as Mission Partner Environment and the standup of the Cyber Academic Engagement Office to work to accelerate Identity, Credential, and Access Management enterprise solutions, Ms. Beavers’ unique blend of uniformed, civilian, and private industry experience drove success and innovation.”

Beavers also played a key role in the Office of the CIO’s delivery of its Fulcrum IT strategy in 2024 with then-CIO John Sherman.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop, Beavers detailed the genesis of Fulcrum, which has become the guiding strategic framework for the Pentagon’s IT modernization.

“It was really important to crystallize the department’s vision into what success looks like, which is what we are attempting to do here in Fulcrum because I am trying to get program managers across the department — not just within the CIO organizations, but in all the different weapon systems program offices — to make decisions a little differently, to make them with the user experience in mind, to make them with interoperability as a priority first and really defining what success looks like, and giving them that vision,” she said.

When Sherman stepped down from the CIO role at the end of June 2024, Beavers filled it temporarily until Katie Arrington was appointed to perform the duties of CIO in March. Since then, Beavers retained her deputy role, supporting new efforts under Arrington’s leadership like the Software Fast Track initiative and “blowing up” the Risk Management Framework.

It’s unclear what Beavers’ next role will be after her departure or who will take her place when she officially leaves. DefenseScoop reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

Prior to serving as principal deputy CIO, Beavers was director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance enterprise capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security and an intelligence officer in the Air Force at the rank of brigadier general. She also held roles in the private sector with GE and NBC Universal.

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The DOD Office of the CIO announced the move by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to place Arrington as the acting CIO in a post on LinkedIn. The post also confirmed that Leslie Beavers, who had been acting CIO since John Sherman left the role last June, will return to her primary role as principal deputy CIO.

“In this capacity, Ms. Arrington serves as the primary advisor to the Secretary of Defense for information management/Information Technology (IT); information assurance, as well as non-intelligence space systems; critical satellite communications, navigation, and timing programs; spectrum; and telecommunications,” per the LinkedIn post.

A defense official confirmed Arrington started in the role Monday.

The Pentagon CIO is a presidentially appointed role that requires Senate confirmation. It’s unclear if the Trump administration plans to nominate Arrington to the role, and the defense official did not comment when asked about the possibility.

Arrington returned to the Pentagon as CISO on Feb. 18. During the first Trump administration, she served as chief information security officer for the department’s acquisition and sustainment directorate and was regarded as a key architect of the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program, which aims to improve the cybersecurity posture of the defense industrial base and contractors by requiring minimum cyber standards to win contracts.

The final rule for the CMMC program went into effect last December.

Arrington is also known for her political career, running for Congress as a representative for South Carolina’s 1st District in 2018 as a Republican, during which she earned President Donald Trump’s endorsement. However, she lost that race to Democratic nominee Joe Cunningham.

Her tenure during the Trump administration was also marked with controversy. In 2021, Arrington was placed on leave in connection with an alleged unauthorized disclosure of classified information from a military intelligence agency and her security clearance was suspended. She eventually settled a lawsuit over the matter against the DOD in 2022 before announcing another bid for Congress that year.

The controversy surrounding her security clearance became a key discussion point in her run for the House, and she lost the Republican primary to Nancy Mace, who was ultimately elected into office.

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President Donald Trump has nominated former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary, and billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg to be deputy SecDef in his second term. Both men need Senate approval. If confirmed, they and the White House will have the option to name new officials or keep on existing staff for certain top Defense Department positions.

In conversations over email this week, sources revealed who is currently functioning in a few of those key roles between now and the arrival of DOD’s new bosses.

“Acting Chief Information Officer is Ms. Leslie Beavers,” a spokesperson told DefenseScoop late Tuesday.

Beavers, who retired from the Air Force as a reserve brigadier general, was tapped as acting CIO in July 2024 after John Sherman’s departure. She previously served as Sherman’s deputy and helped oversee multiple high-stakes, enterprise IT initiatives inside DOD.

A Pentagon spokesperson also confirmed that Gurpreet Bhatia is temporarily serving in dual-hatted roles as acting deputy CIO for cybersecurity and DOD’s chief information security officer. Before working at the Pentagon, Bhatia led the National Security Agency’s engagements with foreign partners, among other senior government roles.

Defense acquisition expert Radha Plumb assumed the role of DOD’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer in April 2024. In a recent interview ahead of her planned departure from the department, Plumb told DefenseScoop that Principal Deputy CDAO Margie Palmieri was set to serve as the acting chief of the office in the interim until Trump’s pick is named.

Personnel in the CDAO told DefenseScoop Wednesday that the hub is largely operating as if Palmieri is its director this week. Pentagon spokespersons did not confirm that she’s officially leading the organization.

Separately, sources at the Defense Innovation Unit told DefenseScoop this week that former Apple executive Doug Beck continues to head the organization, where he took the helm in April 2023. Historically, “the DIU director is not a politically appointed role,” one official noted.

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In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Department of Defense acting Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers briefed DefenseScoop on this unfolding pursuit — and the overarching aims for expanding it to enable the U.S. military, Canada and their other closest international partners to work more seamlessly and securely together on combined operations.

“At the heart of interoperability between nations is trust and cooperation. And ICAM is partially a technology solution, but the more challenging part is the cooperation portion and the solution,” Beavers explained.

Putting it simply, ICAM for the DOD refers to a broad approach for establishing and maintaining trusted environments where users can tap into authorized resources — like databases and information systems — while ensuring the department knows who is on the network at any specific time. It’s also a key element of the broader zero-trust architecture concept that the Pentagon is currently moving toward.

While many ICAM capabilities are already functioning across the Pentagon, there’s much room for improvement, and innovation — particularly with international allies.

“We were talking about ICAM when I walked in the building in 2018 and I hadn’t seen any really noticeable progress. That’s why I went all in last year to make headway on ICAM. And so, I think we’re to the point where we’ve got good momentum. We’ll keep building on these lessons, and then we’ll take it to the next level and make a functional, scalable, sustainable and secure network for our allies and partners, as well as the joint force,” Beavers said.

The CIO and members of her team meet every six months with their counterparts across the Five Eyes alliance, comprised of the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. 

When a new top information official from the Canadian Forces, Ross Ermel, joined those meetings fairly recently, Beavers said they immediately “just kind of hit it off.” With shared intent to accelerate ICAM interoperability between the nations, Beavers and Ermel volunteered to collaboratively scope the complex challenges down from the large chunks they’d been going after to a much smaller problem they could pilot a technical solution for and work out the policy issues around to ultimately make some meaningful headway.

“And we had a big win last week when we made that happen for 35 people. It sounds like a small number, but it was the first technology solution where we truly federated our identity, credential and access management. That means that the U.S. identity provider computer trusted the Canadian certificates coming through, and vice versa. So that is a big step,” Beavers said.

Though she didn’t share the name of the ICAM capability or any platforms that might be involved in the pilot, the CIO confirmed that this is associated with a combined IT system that the U.S. and Canada built together and have been using for years — but the identity piece has always been managed on the American side only. 

In federating it, the Pentagon team is now expanding its “trust” to the systems of another nation.

“So this enables them to log in from Canada, using their own identity provider to get access to these combined systems that we both use. So, it sounds small, but it is quite monumental,” Beavers told DefenseScoop. 

Building momentum on these smaller-scale “baby steps,” she said the next steps involve working through the engineering and policy challenges to expand it with other Five Eyes partners in a way that should also work with every member of the NATO alliance down the line.

“We’re using kind of this small use case as the pathfinder, and then we’re building on those lessons, with an eye on exporting to NATO,” Beavers explained.

She and Ermel are set to spotlight this work at the NATO Edge Conference on Wednesday.

When previewing this latest progress for DefenseScoop, Beavers added that she’s hopeful the nations involved right now will go all in on building out the solution and accelerating the overall adoption — “because the follow on will be an update to [Allied Communications Publication 240], which is the Five Eyes directive on how to set up networks.” 

Notably, the CIO and her team also consider this work to be “foundational” and “a major enabler” to the Pentagon’s plan for fully realizing next-generation, Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) that leaders believe will be a key to winning in future warfighting constructs.

“The important thing to understand is this is part of a three-step journey that gets us to full interoperability with allies and partners,” Beavers noted.

Step one encompasses instituting zero trust in the cloud. ICAM is the second piece that allows the DOD to know and trust who accesses its information in the clouds and makes them all function together. And the third step is attribute-based access control, which Beavers said occurs at the application level. 

“So, we are making steady progress, and by the end of next year — with a bit of luck — we should have those three solved, at least in a simple use case, which will jump-start us as a community to build out a lot more functionality,” the CIO told DefenseScoop. 

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In the Defense Department, the term “zero trust” refers to a nascent cybersecurity framework and set of 152 activities collectively meant to enable non-stop monitoring and constant authentication to secure critical national security data and information. As its name suggests, the zero-trust concept assumes all networks are compromised from the get-go.

During FedTalks 2024, hosted by Scoop News Group on Tuesday, Les Call — director of the DOD’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office — provided the latest update on his team’s unfolding pursuits to drive this implementation, and to continue “progressing at a fast rate.” 

“One of the things about a freight train is, once you get it going, you can’t stop, or it’s very, very difficult to stop. That’s the momentum that we’ve created, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Call said.

The Biden Administration issued an executive order in 2021 mandating the federal government to secure cloud services and other assets via approved zero-trust approaches. Not long after that, in 2022, DOD’s then Chief Information Officer John Sherman set the department on an ambitious path to implement a fully zero trust-based architecture across its sprawling enterprise by 2027.

Call said Pentagon officials are working closely with a range of industry partners and representatives, including the Cloud Security Alliance, to pinpoint compliant capabilities that can accelerate DOD components’ paths to fully achieving zero trust.

“2024 was the year of concepts. We put together 18 proof of concepts, and three of them we’ve completed. One we’ve actually assessed — and that’s the Navy’s Flank Speed, which assessed the Microsoft cloud service provider network, which was very favorable in zero trust,” Call explained.

He confirmed that his team has also recently linked up with MIT Lincoln Laboratory to put together what he said will be “a proving ground” to continue to assess solutions. 

“We’re actually working on right now and finalizing an actual assessment standard, because you can’t assess zero trust the way you would do a normal red team assessment,” Call said.  

Although he did not provide further details on that effort, Call highlighted some of the CIO’s early progress on zero trust to date. However, he also emphasized the challenges that accompany “changing the culture” of how the Pentagon operates, particularly in terms of technology acquisition and cybersecurity at scale. 

Following Sherman’s recent departure, Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Leslie Beaver stepped in as acting CIO and subsequently rolled out the department’s new IT advancement strategy called Fulcrum.

Call said that Beavers had been “quietly working on” Fulcrum for two years. The strategy broadly places a sharp focus on agile processes and user experience, and outlines concrete metrics for officials to track tangible progress.

“And so as her philosophy lined up with what we’re doing, it now gives us the opportunity to utilize the hammer — that’s the CIO’s office — to affect this culture change,” Call said.

Before joining the Pentagon in 2023 as its “orchestrator for zero trust,” in his words, Call served as the White House National Security Council’s IT director.

“The DOD is the largest federal organization. When you think of your services, your military including the National Guard and Reserves, you’ve got over 2 million people, over 750,000 civilians made up of 43 separate components — and that covers more than 500,000 facilities across the world. And when you think about securing that vast space and how difficult that is — not to mention what a target that we are — it’s a pretty traumatizing task. And that’s kind of what I thought when I first was introduced a little over a year ago,” he noted.

Still, these measures and the ambitious approach are necessary to deter adversaries like the Chinese government, which Call said is operating on “correlating timelines” as DOD regarding cyber threats and security.

“All of your major [U.S.] intel organizations have reported to Congress to say, ‘Hey, there’s this group called the People’s Republic of China, and they’re involved in all of our critical infrastructure and, oh, by the way, they’re doing this philosophy, which we call Living Off the Land where they’re just kind of camping out, and they’re waiting for the word so that they can create social havoc — meaning you and I could wake up one morning and we have no cell service, we have no power, and the water tastes like chlorine, so we can’t drink it. And then what do we do?’” Call said.

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At the same time, leadership and personnel turnover at the DOD Chief Information Office prohibited officials from conducting annual reviews of the strategy’s implementation, the probe found.

Released in 2019, the Pentagon’s first-ever digital modernization strategy (DMS) looked to increase technological capabilities across the department and improve overall adoption of modern systems in response to emerging threats and new tools. The strategy included four strategic initiatives — innovation for advantage, optimization, resilient cybersecurity and cultivation of talent — with accompanying objectives and tasks, known as “strategy elements,” as well as a roadmap for implementation through fiscal 2023.

But an audit from the Pentagon Inspector General’s office, published July 9, found that 54 of the 131 strategy elements were not “specific, verifiable and measurable” in accordance with requirements from the Office of Management and Budget, therefore preventing the DOD CIO from effectively monitoring progress towards goals outlined in the strategy.

“Modernizing its digital environment is crucial for the DoD to ensure the Joint Force has a competitive advantage in the modern battlespace. The DMS should create a centralized and focused path to guide daily decision making to achieve DoD’s digital modernization goals,” the Inspector General’s report stated. “However, without specific, verifiable, and measurable strategy elements, the DoD cannot meaningfully track progress towards achievement of DMS goals.”

For example, the audit notes that the task to “modernize the global command and control system — Joint” does not provide any quantifiable measures or specified end results for the desired system, which also makes it difficult to measure progress on the task. In addition, the goal to “modernize” is not clear or precise enough in this context, according to the review. 

Of the 54 strategy elements flagged as being not specific, verifiable and measurable, the DOD CIO has reported that 17 of them have been completed — although the Inspector General’s audit could not confirm whether or not that was the case. 

Moving forward, the IG report recommends that the CIO “develop and implement standard operating procedures that include definitions for ‘specific,’ ‘verifiable,’ and ‘measurable.’” Since the recommendation, the CIO’s office has reported that the deputy chief experience officer has been tasked to develop and implement the suggested standards, and expects them to be completed by the end of August.

In addition, the audit found that the DOD did not conduct annual reviews of the digital modernization strategy in fiscal 2022 and 2023 — another requirement from the OMB. A former employee of the CIO reported that the office did not conduct reviews due to changes in the office’s leadership and discussions on whether to update the digital modernization strategy or develop a brand new one. 

The audit emphasized that “by not conducting annual DMS reviews in conjunction with DoD’s Annual Performance Plan reviews, the DoD missed opportunities to identify performance gaps or changes to mission needs, priorities, goals, objectives, or strategy elements that require updates.”

As for fiscal 2020 and 2021, CIO personnel “could not provide documentation supporting that the DMS was reviewed alongside the Annual Performance Plan or that OCIO personnel identified performance gaps in the DMS based on changes to DoD mission needs, priorities, or goals,” according to the IG report.

The Pentagon’s CIO did decide to release a new strategy, dubbed Fulcrum, in June that is structured around four lines of effort. Acting DOD CIO Leslie Beavers told DefenseScoop ahead of the new strategy’s release that it represented a more mature version of its predecessor.

“It’s taking into account the new technologies that have been developed and, kind of, the changing world situation and how we are just providing that kind of refreshed vision for how we need to move out in the department in the next five years,” Beavers said.

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Now, following the official release of DOD’s new Fulcrum: IT Advancement Strategy on Tuesday, the Chief Information Office-led team that shaped it is moving to mobilize an enterprisewide commitment to the four, integrated directions the blueprint is organized around.

“I’m going to spend the rest of this calendar year making sure that we put in place the right governance structure to help oversee synchronizing the department to move out and deliver in these lines of effort,” Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers explained.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop to preview Fulcrum ahead of its publication, Beavers shed light on Pentagon leadership’s vision for carrying out this next-generation IT strategy and what its realization could really look like for DOD.

“It was really important to crystallize the department’s vision into what success looks like, which is what we are attempting to do here in Fulcrum because I am trying to get program managers across the department — not just within the CIO organizations, but in all the different weapon systems program offices — to make decisions a little differently, to make them with the user experience in mind, to make them with interoperability as a priority first and really defining what success looks like, and giving them that vision,” she said.

Lean Six Sigma

CIO leaders aim to expedite DOD’s evolution from a hardware-defined to a more flexible, software-defined enterprise through Fulcrum, which builds on the flagship 2019 defense modernization strategy.

“This is really representing a maturation of that strategy. We were at the five-year point [in] the tech industry, the modernization journey — that’s why it’s not a new strategy. It’s an advancement of the previous strategy. It’s taking into account the new technologies that have been developed and, kind of, the changing world situation and how we are just providing that kind of refreshed vision for how we need to move out in the department in the next five years,” Beavers told DefenseScoop.

Unlike heaps of prior federal strategies, she deliberately ensured that this one wasn’t nicknamed with an abbreviation.

“I didn’t want an acronym — another DMS [for defense modernization strategy], or something like that. That just doesn’t inspire you to, like, want to read it,” Beavers said.

She opted to host “a little competition” amongst DOD colleagues to encourage a creative name for the new guide.

“Whoever came up with the name that I chose, I took to lunch. There were over 40 people involved in writing this document, by the way, from across the department. So this isn’t just Leslie-, or even CIO-team generated. This is a Department of Defense team-generated strategy. And because Fulcrum is at the pivot point between the national security strategies and the defense strategies, how do we translate those strategies into specific actions to take within the department to deliver those capabilities? That’s why Fulcrum really resonated with me when it was one of the proposals,” Beavers explained. 

In the interview, she emphasized that professionally she intentionally pursues a “Lean Six Sigma” managerial approach.

“You start with the customer experience first, and what are you trying to deliver for the end user or the customer? In this case, it’s the warfighter — and my experience over the years with being a reservist and having a lot of connectivity challenges is one of the main reasons why I’m here. So starting with, what does it feel for the warfighter? How we function from a warfighter perspective is most important,” Beavers said. 

In her view, the U.S. combatant commands are Fulcrum’s primary end users.

“We are very closely partnered with the Joint Staff, J6. I look at them as our main conduit into the combatant commands. And when I say ‘warfighter,’ I’m thinking of everybody, from at the combatant command headquarters all the way out to the soldier, or the Marine sitting on an island, isolated somewhere,” Beavers said. 

Broadly, the Fulcrum strategy is structured around four lines of effort that the document states represent “a strategic shift that embraces technology as a mission enabler.” They include:

• LOE 1: Provide Joint Warfighting IT capabilities to expand strategic dominance of U.S. Forces  and mission partners.
• LOE 2: Modernize information networks and compute to rapidly meet mission and business needs.
• LOE 3: Optimize IT governance to gain efficiencies in capability delivery and enable cost savings.
• LOE 4: Cultivate a premier digital workforce ready to deploy emerging technology to the warfighter.

Each of those lines is also supported by a series of strategic objectives that span Pentagon portfolios, which further detail the envisioned way ahead — and indicate clear, measurable mechanisms to trace teams’ progress.

“This really translates strategic vision into tangible actions that the warfighter should feel,” Beavers said.

Typically, government strategies don’t go “down to that level,” she added. But on Beavers’ part, this was purposeful — drawing from her unique background in the government and major corporations, like GE Healthcare and NBCUniversal. 

“[Often] in industry, the pervasive opinion is that if you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business. And in the [DOD], we know certain numbers. But I’m trying to really grow the kind of awareness all the way down into the organization — beyond just the CIO, or beyond just the senior leaders — to get after making tangible progress that they can tell the story on so that they can get the right resources to continue to grow,” the deputy CIO said. “These modernization initiatives and IT have not always been at the forefront of people’s minds as important things to fund, and they really, I think, should be.”

Notably, the launch of this new pathway and plan comes as the Pentagon and military are working hard to realize a number of next-generation initiatives, including but not limited to those to enable the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), and an enterprise-wide cybersecurity approach based on the contemporary concept for zero-trust.  

“We’re facing a whole-of-nation threat, and it requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-nation response,” Beaver noted.

She continued: “So, I really want to foot-stomp that we’re only as good as our weakest link, especially in the cyber world. Taking to heart the cybersecurity and interoperability functionality — that — I need everybody to work on. This is not something that we can do by ourselves. Within the IT workforce, we’re less than 10% of the total workforce. We can’t do it for everybody, so we’ve got to have everybody pile on and help. If they are willing to give me a little bit of time and read Fulcrum, it’s a short read, but it would be very helpful.”

‘The Big Uglies’

Beavers’ unique professional experience spans decades and disciplines.

Her defense career began as an Air Force intelligence officer, and she ultimately retired as a reserve brigadier general. Before she took on this position within the Office of the CIO, she served as the director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance enterprise capabilities (ISREC) — where she led Project Herald, the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security’s Defense Intelligence Digital Transformation Campaign.

“That work absolutely influenced the Fulcrum work, because we just built on what we learned from Herald and scaled it up to the department. And so, we did have a lot of participation across the board,” Beavers noted. 

It took six months for dozens of DOD officials to develop, refine and agree upon the final version of the Fulcrum strategy.

“It’s lightning fast [for DOD],” Beavers said.

“I didn’t want a strategy that was in the silos. I needed something that was cross-cutting about delivering for the customer and that user experience, that customer focus is throughout the document. And to do that, you have to think of the outcomes. So, I started assembling that team in January. We really kind of rolled our sleeves up and had 40 people in a room working on it,” she explained.

Outside of her military career, Beavers’ leadership approach is also informed by more than 15 years of experience in multiple private sector industries — including as a vice president at NBC/Universal Pictures tasked with recovering 80 years of broadcast content destroyed in a fire.

“I tend to gravitate towards what I call the ‘big uglies,’ which is a quote that comes out of Disney’s Three Musketeers. Oliver Platt’s character says that when he runs into this guy in the dungeon, he’s like, ‘Oh, big ugly!’ and turns around and runs away,” she explained.

“But I’m the one that stands there and tries to sort out the big uglies and take on the areas that I think are foundational and really important, but maybe don’t get the attention that other kind of flashier options to work on,” Beavers said.

Though she did not refer to it in this way herself, one could argue that a Pentagon-central “big ugly” that influenced Fulcrum was the viral “Fix Our Computers” push.

“I think it’s a natural response. I would have done it without the Fix Our Computers campaign anyway, because I’m in the Fix Our Computers campaign — like, that’s what I’ve experienced. So we are, within the department, very aware of that challenge,” she said.

Now that Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks signed off on this new strategy, Beavers and her team are shifting to a phase where they intend to, as she put it, “mobilize the department-wide commitment to” executing on each of its four guiding inclusions.

“To do that, I’m going to highlight at least one area within each of the LOEs to champion and make sure that the governance processes that I oversee align with driving progress within that area. And so I’m working with the team on that, but [Mission Partner Environments, or MPEs] kind of very top of the list. The cyber workforce is top of mind,” she explained.

Officials involved are also generating even deeper, specific metrics that will be an annex to the overarching plan.

“So for example, if you’re saying, ‘Well my cloud implementation is pretty good, but I want to work on my cyber workforce stuff, what are the metrics? What should I be doing to develop that?’ So that will be coming out,” Beavers said.

Another in-the-works resource that will soon accompany Fulcrum is an associated implementation plan meant to firm up a distinct framework for carrying out the DOD’s fresh strategic vision.

“Then I’ll pick a few flagship efforts to champion, personally, to demonstrate for the department how to do this. Within the DOD, we’re pretty resourceful — and the whole ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’ [notion] is part of our DNA. When you do have these kinds of flagship efforts, other people will pile on. And so I’ll be looking for that to start happening. I think that’ll take another six or eight months before I’ll start seeing a pile on, but that’ll be my next benchmark,” Beavers told DefenseScoop.

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“This office will establish a data-driven approach, informed by network and user device performance data and continuous customer feedback, to improve the [Defense Department’s] user experience (UX),” Principal Deputy DOD CIO Leslie Beavers told DefenseScoop in an email on Tuesday. 

Broadly, the office’s staff will work to “develop strategic guidance, assess DOD’s performance, and align business objectives with user needs,” she said. 

Boosting customer experience across the department’s sprawling IT enterprise has become a top priority for Pentagon leadership over the last few years — including Beavers and Sherman, who first acknowledged plans to launch this new CXO office back in August 2023.

Six months prior, in Feb 2023, an investigation by the Defense Business Board revealed that user experience with DOD information technology was largely average or below average. And before that, in early 2022, defense personnel led a viral social media campaign urging top officials to “fix our computers.”

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesperson said: “I can tell you this is not a direct result of the ‘fix my computer’ memo, but is a result of the Defense Business Board recommendation and the CIO leadership team’s years of experience in both the commercial and government [realms].”

The official confirmed on Wednesday that Savan Kong was tapped to lead the new CXO Portfolio Management Office, in a permanent capacity. According to his official bio, Kong previously served as a digital service expert for the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service (DDS) organization, general manager at the tech startup Rebellion Defense, and as the first employee at the real estate giant Redfin.

On Tuesday, Beavers spotlighted some of the office’s early aims.

“Key near term initiatives include updating the Digital Modernization Strategy to better align with the Strategic Management Plan and current IT and Cybersecurity approaches, updating performance analysis programs and processes, and providing targeted programs with process improvement assistance,” she told DefenseScoop. 

Updated on Jan. 24, 2024, at 11:45 AM: This story has been updated to reflect that Savan Kong was tapped to lead the new CXO Portfolio Management Office.

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The DOD is establishing a user experience portfolio management office under its chief information officer organization, according to a top Pentagon IT official.

The office is in part a response to the viral “Fix Our Computers” open letter from early last year that listed a raft of issues with IT systems – such as comically slow bootup times for computers – demanding DOD address them. It also stems from a Defense Business Board study in February where 80 percent of respondents said the user experience was average or below average.

“We’re standing up the user experience portfolio management office and hiring a senior leader to come in and lead that,” Leslie Beavers, DOD’s principal deputy chief information officer, said at the annual DAFITC conference, adding this is the long-term way ahead on user experience and that the DOD plans to “really take a holistic approach to this to delivering world-class IT to our service members.”

The new office will follow the model of the DOD’s zero trust portfolio management office, led by Randy Resnick, she said.

DOD CIO John Sherman has said since last year that user experience is a top priority for him, following the open letter.

“Working with the other CIOs in the department, we are committed to getting after this — and indeed we are … I can promise you other CIOs are too because this is a multitude of efforts. We have to get after hardware, transport, the software that’s running on the system, all to enhance the user experience,” he said previously, noting that he’s also been on the receiving end of poor user experience.

“I’ve been the guy on the other end of this. If anyone knew me about 25 years ago at the Washington Navy Yard, I was the one running down the hall talking to the staff about why my electronic light table wasn’t working or I couldn’t get my database remarks in.”

Ultimately, Beavers said she wants the systems to work so well that users do not even know who the CIO is because their IT runs so seamlessly.

“My ideal result is you don’t know who the CIO is. Things just work, just like when you go to your house and you turn on the electricity or the water. It just works,” she said. “That’s my ideal end state.”

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Beavers will take over the role May 8 after Kelly Fletcher vacated it last October to become CIO of the State Department. Since then, DOD Chief Information Security Officer Dave McKeown has filled the role in an acting capacity.

Beavers comes to DOD’s Office of the CIO after serving in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security as director of enterprise capabilities. She has also spent time as the mobilization assistant to the vice commander of 16th Air Force.

“I’d like to welcome Leslie to the DoD CIO! Her most recent experience in OUSD(I&S) as the Director of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Enterprise Capabilities leading the Defense Intelligence Digital Transformation Campaign Plan will enable her to hit the ground running on initiatives such as Zero Trust, JWCC, Software Modernization, and EMSO. I’d also like to thank Dave McKeown for the terrific work he has done filling in as the acting Principal Deputy for the last six months. Dave’s experience, leadership, and drive have been invaluable as we rolled out Zero Trust and awarded JWCC,” DOD CIO John Sherman said in a statement posted on LinkedIn.

As principal deputy CIO, she will be tasked with working with Sherman to advise the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense on IT and IT-related matters. She will also work with defense agencies’ and field activities’ CIOs to drive strategic management of resources.

A member of the Air Force Reserves for more than three decades, Beavers earned the rank of brigadier general in 2019.

In 2020, she also joined Academy Securities — a veteran-owned and operated investment bank — as an adviser.

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