Jennifer Hay — who has previously served in leadership roles in the Pentagon and private sector — was recently tapped as DDS’ new principal deputy. 

That news comes about a month after Maryland Gov.-elect Wes Moore appointed Katie Savage to be the state’s next secretary of information technology. Savage had moved up the ranks within DDS over several years and was at the time serving as DDS director, as well as deputy CDAO — both of which she exited to serve in Moore’s administration.

While Hay is the new deputy for DDS within the CDAO, “Jinyoung Englund is still acting director and serving in the position Katie Savage had [previously] filled,” a CDAO spokesperson told DefenseScoop on Friday.

Hay previously served as DOD’s deputy director for intelligence and security (I&S) programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She also held multiple leadership roles in the private sector at DataRobot, according to her LinkedIn profile.

On Friday, the CDAO spokesperson did not confirm when Hay’s is stepping into her new position.

Prior to her appointment as acting deputy CDAO, Englund served as DDS chief of staff and was a digital service expert for strategic operations and product, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Craig Martell, who came to the Pentagon after being head of machine learning at Lyft, remains the department’s chief digital and AI officer — a role he assumed last spring.

The first iteration of DDS — originally known as the Defense Digital Service — was formed in November 2015 by the late Defense Secretary Ash Carter, as a pilot program to drive technological transformation within the Department of Defense. In February 2022, DDS kept its acronym but was absorbed into the newly established CDAO as the Directorate for Digital Services. Savage joined DDS in 2019 and was eventually named permanent director around the time of that broad reorganization in 2022.

In its current iteration, DDS still encompasses software and data engineers, data scientists, product managers and user research designers working to quickly deliver digital capabilities and usable products. In her LinkedIn profile, Englund described the organization as “a SWAT team of nerds based at the Pentagon in the office of the Secretary of Defense tasked with solving the DoD’s most pressing problems leveraging the best in modern technology.”

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Defense Department personnel left the conference in Las Vegas with informative lessons about securely operationalizing the technology in a specific use case and recruiting tech-savvy personnel as the labor landscape evolves, DOD’s Digital Services Director Katie Savage said Thursday at the Fortinet Security Transformation Summit hosted by FedScoop.

“As we’ve seen in the news, industrial control systems are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks because they’re so dependent on technology. And more specifically, microgrids rely on weather data,” Savage explained. 

DOD has big plans to deploy local, self-contained electric grids — or microgrids — to 134 military installations, starting in May. 

The Army “in particular has really taken the lead on this,” Savage noted. Right now, members of the service are building microgrids that will be tested for vulnerabilities before putting them into use. Officials involved in that work opted to leverage the DEF CON conference as an opportunity to help puzzle out how to deal with specific industry and ICS threats and vulnerabilities. 

“So what we’ve learned in working with the DEF CON community is that the data underlying microgrids can actually be manipulated by false weather data,” Savage explained.

Weather information marks one of the largest data inputs that influence how those mini-grids work. The most modern partial microgrids depend on a management system that will implement a simple AI for controlling the behavior and the grid, according to Savage. Typically, such a system will usually take in weather data as a means of optimizing the performance of the microgrid throughout the day or the week. 

“So, this is a system that we had people attack at DEF CON,” Savage said. To do so, hackers injected what she referred to as “sort of impossible” weather conditions. “Imagine the weather in Alaska being injected into a microgrid in Texas,” she said. 

From that practice at the conference, Pentagon officials recognized that hackers were able to manipulate the microgrids by manipulating the weather data — which suggested that they should not trust the underlying AI capabilities that were part of the microgrid system. 

So, an important component of deploying associated microgrid technologies “is not just ensuring that the data is accessible, and that it’s clean, and that we can feel confident about where’s it’s being stored — but to the extent that we’re starting to bring AI and ML capabilities to it, we also need to feel confident from a cybersecurity perspective, that the data hasn’t been tampered with,” Savage said.

Throughout her public service, Savage has also advocated for innovation in how the DOD recruits and maintains talent. 

Coming out of the COVID-19 shutdown, many employees now seem more mission-oriented, she noted, and aim to gain more job security. To her, this means it is an excellent time to be thinking about how the Pentagon can accelerate the growth of its cybersecurity talent. 

“Again, I mean, this is something we saw at DEF CON. Maybe it’s not the conventional hackers and mentees that we would be thinking about bringing into government, but they’re the people who’ve helped us expose this wider path that we saw. So, now it’s time to be really creative about who and where we recruit from, because we absolutely need to be more thoughtful and more intentional about the cyber workforce that we’re bringing into the DOD,” she said.

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“It’s so interesting. I really thought that there would be an adverse effect on government hiring because of the economy and because of [more people working from home] — and that’s just been the opposite,” Savage said on Thursday at CyberScoop’s CyberTalks event in Washington.

DDS is essentially a “rapid response team” of expert engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers working within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Following a recent reorganization of multiple offices, the team was moved under the purview of the nascent Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in OSD.  

DDS officials typically serve two- to five-year terms within the department. But since the pandemic and associated shutdowns, some technologists are now actively interested in serving for longer, Savage noted.

“And increasingly, right here in interviews, people want to be more mission focused. They don’t want to build like a dog-walking app or something like that — they’re saying things like ‘I want a job that my children will be proud of,’” Savage said. “And they’re also interested in the stability that the government can provide.” 

Many people applying to DDS and the Pentagon in technology-focused roles now were laid off from industry jobs, she observed. 

“The workforce and the environment shifted during the pandemic. So, I think in government we have an incredible opportunity right now to take advantage of the flexibility and the stability that the government can provide and, you know, the mission that industry can’t always compete with,” Savage said.

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This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.

“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson.

New hires include: 

• Chief Digital and AI Officer – Craig Martell
• Deputy CDAO – Margaret Palmieri
• DCDAO for Acquisition – Sharothi Pikar
• DCDAO for Policy, Strategy and Governance – Clark Cully
• DCDAO for Enterprise Platforms and Business Optimization – Greg Little
• DCDAO for Algorithmic Warfare – Joe Larson
• DCDAO for Digital Services – Katie (Olson) Savage
• Chief Operating Officer – Dan Folliard
• Chief Technology Officer – Bill Streilein
• Chief of AI Assurance – Jane Pinelis

Diane Staheli was also recently tapped to lead the CDAO’s Responsible AI (RAI) Division.

Several of these officials have already made waves within DOD, including founder and former director of the Navy’s digital warfare office Margaret Palmieri, and Joe Larson, who previously served as deputy chief for the Pentagon’s Project Maven.

In these new roles at the CDAO, the officials will help steer the Pentagon’s strategy development and policy formulation for associated solutions; enable data access and AI adoption within appropriate institutional processes; establish a strong digital infrastructure and services to support military and department components’ AI- and digital-driven deployments, and more.

The CDAO is targeting October 1 for the full administrative alignment of personnel and resources, the spokesperson told FedScoop.

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