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.

In 1961, Robert McNamara became the nation’s Secretary of Defense after a lengthy career at the Ford Motor Company. McNamara implemented a process he developed at Ford called systems analysis for making key decisions involving weapons development, force requirements, and budget.

The goal was to systematically produce a long-term, program-oriented DOD strategy, which was great for fans of thorough analysis, but not so terrific for speed.

“Think about it; our budget planning process was created by Robert McNamara,” Conlin said. “It requires you to plan everything for five years, and it takes more than a year to plan a single year’s worth of activity. Cascading those performance measures down has been difficult because much of the decision-making processes in the Department have been based on slow-moving systems and slow-moving data.”

Gaining data visibility

To overcome data inertia, Conlin has focused on one requirement of the Foundations Act to create an authoritative Federal Data Catalogue. In a recent appearance, Conlin described how the DOD now has a detailed cost baseline for 75% of the budget. This included a breakdown on money spent for resources by location along with consumption costs for various IT services.

“This is a work in progress,” Conlin said. “You don’t want to wait weeks or months for some paperwork to move around. We need to bring people into a modern approach to data.”

By hiring its first CDO, the DOD is taking a major step toward modeling its operations after the private sector where data drives business. Recognizing the importance of the role, the government placed Conlin in a structure where he reported directly to the chief management officer, who is third-in-command behind the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of the agency.

The role of the CDO is also separate from the chief information officer, who reports to the chief management officer as well. It’s a structure that makes sense to Conlin based on his years of experience within the IT industry.

“We used to see CDOs reporting to CIOs,” Conlin said. “That’s fallen dramatically in terms of the frequency; because we now recognize that’s just failure mode, you don’t want to go down that path. It’s all about what executive is driving performance for the organization, and that’s the person the CDO should report to.”

After one year on the job, the former HPE executive has a clear-eyed view of the challenges and opportunities he faces in his role as the first CDO in DOD history. It’s now about bringing the agency into the modern data management age, while he upholds his oath of office.

“This is ultimately about improving affordability and performance of the Department,” Conlin said. “What’s the data, who can access it under what policy for what purpose, roles and responsibilities, identity management, all of this is a combined set of solutions that we have to put in place. That’s the essence of the role.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium:

Photo: SiliconANGLE