Michael Conlin, US Department of Defense | MIT CDOIQ 2019
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 31/07/2019

Michael Conlin Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Department of Defense join theCUBE hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin) live from MIT CDOIQ 2019

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https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/06/pentagons-first-cdo-navigates-the-data-challenges-in-governments-largest-organization-mitcdoiq-guestoftheweek/

Pentagon’s first CDO navigates the data challenges in government’s largest organization

The past year has been filled with firsts for Michael Conlin, chief data officer at the U.S. Department of Defense.

He was named the Pentagon’s first CDO in August 2018, giving him an opportunity to manage data for the nation’s largest government organization. It was the first time Conlin (pictured) worked for a federal agency, one that just happened to have a budget of $46 billion, 10,000 operational systems and a physical infrastructure covering 5,000 different locations across 30 million acres of land.

It was also the first time that Conlin had ever taken an oath of office, required of every new employee entering civil or uniformed service, that he would defend the Constitution of the United States.

“It felt like it took an hour to choke it out because I was suddenly struck with all of this emotion, the gravity of what I was doing,” Conlin recalled. “Let me exercise that spirit of patriotism that many of us have, but we’ve not found the opportunity. When this opportunity came along, I just couldn’t say no to it.”

Conlin spoke with Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the MIT CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They discussed how Conlin’s corporate background prepared him for his current role, a mandate for change within the DoD, navigating the Pentagon’s top-down culture, making the agency’s data more visible and the evolving role of CDOs (see the full interview with transcript here).

This week, theCUBE features Michael Conlin as its Guest of the Week.

CDOs required for agencies
Conlin found himself taking the oath last summer because a combination of recently passed legislation and recommendations from a bipartisan commission moved the government to embrace a broader federal data strategy. Under provisions of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, all federal agencies must now appoint CDOs.

Conlin himself was no stranger to the federal government’s information-technology operations. Although his career prior to last August was strictly in the private sector, Conlin previously worked with the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security to refine the agencies’ IT strategies while serving in an executive role with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services. He was also the chief technical officer at Perspecta Inc., which holds the Navy’s $3.5-billion Next Generation Enterprise Networks contract.

“I’m a capitalist like most Americans and a serial entrepreneur,” Conlin said. “I had a clear mandate when I was hired.”

Cultural challenges
That mandate was to lift the overall performance of the DOD by using data effectively while helping its leaders make decisions faster. It also involved moving the department to become more sophisticated consumers of data using analytics.

The ultimate challenge for anyone in the CDO role is that he or she works for one of the most command-and-control institutions on the planet. How could Conlin apply his entrepreneurial skill and enterprise experience in a place where top-down authority is carved in stone and getting buy-in for change can be difficult at best?

“It’s actually hard in the DOD,” Conlin said. “Ultimately, people respond to their performance incentives. They need to see their personal future in the future you’re prescribing, and if they don’t see it, you’re going to get resistance every time.”

Conlin developed his strategy from meetings with key DOD leaders. By ascertaining what answers to critical questions those leaders needed, Conlin could then obtain buy-in for what he was trying to accomplish because the data-driven answers he could supply aligned with the leaders’ performance targets.

“When everything gets lined up against that, you get instant support and you know you’re going after the right things,” Conlin explained. “This is not an ‘if you build it, they will come.’ This is not a drift net in the organization to try to gather up all the data. This is spearfishing for specific answers to materially important questions.”

Legacy of systems analysis
The problem, not unusual for many federal agencies, is that systems and information don’t often move as fast as in private enterprise. However, this issue may be more acute within the Pentagon because of historical change going back more than half a century.

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