The Defense Department Chief Information Officer (CIO) Terry Halvorsen awarded six individual and eight teams as recipients of the 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer Awards for Cyber and Information Technology Excellence, the department said Thursday.

The awardees are meant to represent advancement in cyber and IT issues from CIO organizations across the DoD as well as the Five Eyes (FVEY) international mission partners. The FVEY is an intelligence alliance made up of the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in a treaty for joint cooperation on signals intelligence.

Terry Halvorsen, Defense Department Chief Information Officer (CIO) hosts the 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer Awards for Cyber and Information Technology Excellence ceremony. Photo: Army,  Sgt. Alicia Brand.
Terry Halvorsen, Defense Department Chief Information Officer (CIO) hosts the 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer Awards for Cyber and Information Technology Excellence ceremony. Photo: Army, Sgt. Alicia Brand.

Halvorsen said the winners deliver new mission capabilities and developed new technologies for warfighters while also working to guide IT modernization, leading to over $1.2 billion in cost savings. The 14 total winners came out of a total of 125 nominations.

The DoD CIO highlighted that this was the first year an award was given to an ally partner, where the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) partnered with the U.S. to form the Defense as a Platform/New Style of Information Technology team.

“This is a first for us. It is about joint and allies. This is the first time we have ever given an allied award, and it was very fitting,” Halvorsen said at the ceremony.

“Mike Stone is my counterpart in the MoD; he’s my world partner. He asked me to have a U.S. team over there helping and learning with a U.K. team. They’re taking all the MoD and U.K. government to some form of Microsoft 365 cloud distributed computer. At a point, DoD will need to go in this direction, where we have a distributed cloud. It’s very transformational and innovative,” he added.

David Tillotson, DoD assistant deputy chief management officer, offered praise to a team that won for producing a human resources app that saves time and money. “If I can give you money, and you can find efficiencies on how the rest of the department does business, I’m in,” he said as a guest speaker at the ceremony.

Halvorsen underscored that the nominations showed dedication to the CIO mission to lead the DoD Information Enterprise and supported three main objectives: facilitating the delivery of mission capabilities to the warfighter, supporting the development of new technology for the warfighters, and guiding IT modernization and cost savings.

Individual winners include:

  • Army Col. Neil Khatod, Network Operations Division of U.S. Central Command. He led an implemented the mission command communications plan and operationalization of the Mission Partner Environment for the U.S. and allies to conduct counter-ISIL operations in Iraq and Syria. Khatod used existing U.S., NATO, and partner networks to increase coalition network capacity to save about $30 million and optimize information sharing capabilities.
  • Army Lt. Col. Michael Maharaj, Interoperability and Integration Division, Cyber Integration Section at the Joint Staff, Pentagon. He designed and implemented an environment to test multinational defensive cyber operations on a coalition network, incorporating a Multinational Security Operations Center into a coalition environment. This proved collaboration and sharing of cyber defense information, tactics, techniques, and procedures could be accomplished. This supported quantifiable measurement of threat cyber effects,
  • Air Force Lt. Col. Michael A. Ortiz, chief digital officer, Buckley Air Force Base, Aurora, Colo. He led the creation and launch of the Air Force’s first Human Resources Mobile Application for Generations of Airmen in under a year.
  • Army Col. Mark Orwat, chief, installation integration division, under the architecture, operations, networks and space directorate at Headquarters of the Department of the Army. Orwat led and managed the strategy, planning, and budgeting for modernizing, integrating and improving information technology, network operations, and cybersecurity in 290 Army stateside and overseas bases and contingency operations. He synchronized resources and managed integration efforts with military construction projects for significant cost savings. He resulted in Army and Joint communications networks and enterprise services as more cost efficient, operationally effective, and secure.
  • Carma Lynn Pollock, Air Force, Chief, Air Force Long Haul Communications Requirements Work Center at Scott AFB, Ill. Pollock used leadership and expertise to enable mission-critical, net-centric communications across the Air Force and Joint Tenant, Combat Command mission and administrative systems. She transitioned 97 percent of the Air Force’s old Asynchronous Transfer Mode network infrastructure to an improved system and resolved critical fiscal strategy and cost recovery issues to avoid almost $900 million in costs.
  • Carol Wortman, Army, chief, governance and architecture division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Wortman leads the Army Corps of Engineers to migrate from direct Internet connections to the non-classified Internet router protocol network for increased capacity, productivity, and cybersecurity as well as reduced operating costs. She also enables other innovations and cost savings on data center and cloud issues to allow the DoD to eliminate 55 data centers by fiscal year 2021 and save a projected $134 million.

The eight team awards are as follows:

The Defense as a Platform/New Style Information Technology team after winning first allied award at the 2016 DoD CIO annual award ceremony. Army Photo: Sgt. Alicia Brand
The Defense as a Platform/New Style Information Technology team after winning first allied award at the 2016 DoD CIO annual award ceremony. Army Photo: Sgt. Alicia Brand

  • Automated Remediation and Asset Discovery Team, Air Force. This team implemented endpoint management technology that enhanced defensive cyber operations capabilities across 700,000 Air Force enterprise assets. It drove an eight-month acquisition schedule to deliver tools that allow operators to identify and fix network vulnerabilities in seconds rather than a timeline of weeks. They also have the ability to detect, track, target, engage, and mitigate adversarial activities in near-real time.
  • J2 Coalition Information Sharing Team, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Tampa, Fla. The Coalition Information Sharing team delivered a force multiplying, cost saving, and reusable capability that supports four named operations across multiple combatant commands and implements a series of bilateral and multilateral networks connected to a trusted network environment. The team saved about $300 million this fiscal year and will continue to save $45 million annually.
  • Cyber and C4 Directorate A6 Mission Networking Team, U.S. Special Operations Command, Air Force. The team designed, implemented, or improved multiple airborne and terrestrial mission network systems. This secured and increased mission capabilities for Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, situational awareness and digital information exchange. The result reduced operational risk, increased Airborne ISR capability by 100 percent, slashed latency by 40 percent and saved $17 million.
  • Cyberspace Manpower Study Team, National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Va. The team led an 18-month effort to analyze, modernize, and transform cyber and IT services and functions as part of the largest service transformation in the NRO’s history. The effort expanded the NRO’s capabilities in cybersecurity operations, cloud services, and the adoption of services from the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise. The upcoming transition of services and personnel is expected to reduce operations and maintenance costs by at least $50 million annually.
  • Defense as a Platform/New Style of Information Technology, U.S. Partnership, United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD). Using the MoD model to transform delivering core IT capabilities, this program implements Defense-wide, cloud-based, evergreen IT solutions. It calls for upgrading network infrastructure, revamping the IT service model, reorganizing and rebuilding the IT workforce, and migrating to a commercial off-the-shelf cloud services that will satisfy the majority of its unified capabilities requirements. The plan increases cybersecurity while saving millions of pounds annually.
  • European Detachment, Communications Stand Up Team, Installation and Mission Support Center, Air Force. This team established a new organization to manage $21 billion in IT services and infrastructure for customers across 104 countries in the European theater. This successfully executed the largest reorganization of the Air Force Enterprise with zero loss or degradation of IT services, implementing performance improvements and cost savings while continuing communications support to the warfighter during the transition. As a result of the transfer, the team found ways to reduce process time by up to 440 hours and cost savings of up to $125 million annually.
  • Service Support Environment/Global Service Desk Project Team, Defense Information Systems Agency, Arlington, Va. The team established an organizational and technical structure that enabled virtual consolidation of service desk agents from 22 geographic locations to five. This yielded about $75 million in cost avoidance and has changed the way service desk and desktop support is provided. The team also established kiosk support for Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Headquarters that yielded an increase in Tier II Desktop Support resolution, eliminated over 600 backlogged tickets and achieved a collective customer satisfaction rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars.
  • Windows 10 Security Host Baseline Team, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), National Security Agency (NSA) and Air Force Enterprise Configuration Management Office. The team, composed of members from the NSA, DISA, and the Air Force, led the planning for deployment of the Windows 10 Secure Host Baseline to more than three million stakeholders across the DoD. This deployment is set to be the fastest transition to an operating system in the history of the department.