Pentagon CIO Shuffle: Navy Exec Takes the Reins at Defense

Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work announced in a memo to staff Tuesday that Navy Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen would become the department's acting CIO next week. David Devries, the department's deputy CIO for information enterprise, has been holding the post in an acting capacity since Teri Takai stepped down from the position May 2.

The news was first reported by Politico.

Work, who served as deputy secretary of the Navy from early 2009 to March 2013, worked closely with Halvorsen on Navy IT issues. Among the most important was the Next Generation Enterprise Network contract, valued at $3.5 billion and designed to replace the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. Ultimately it will serve 800,000 military users in the United States.

Takai, as the former Defense CIO, pushed the military services hard to embrace departmentwide enterprise IT operations based on cloud computing as a way to operate more efficiently and cut costs. But Halvorsen hasn't fully embraced those concepts for the Navy. In November, he told Nextgov that the Navy would conduct a business case analysis before signing on to a Defensewide email system pushed by Takai. The service had already built email into its NGEN contract.

Halvorsen's appointment as acting Defense CIO does not necessarily mean he will assume the title formally, a Pentagon spokeswoman told C4ISR.