Bill Marion, deputy chief information officer at the U.S. Air Force, has said the service’s move to elevate the CIO role as part of a restructuring effort seeks to bring together information technology, data and business, Federal News Network reported Friday.
His remarks came following the appointment of Matt Donovan, the branch’s undersecretary, as permanent CIO at the Air Force in addition to his role as chief management officer.
“What we wanted to do was unify the IT, network modernization and business transformation space so when you think data, you think business systems and you think IT infrastructure all underneath one hat, all underneath the undersecretary,†Marion said on Ask the CIO.
“We know both from an operational perspective we need to unify and also from an IT implementation perspective where we are tying data all the way back into the network was very critical, especially when you start to get into next generational things like artificial intelligence and machine learning.â€
Marion also provided updates on the service’s network modernization and cloud adoption efforts.
He said AT&T and Microsoft have started prototyping work on new techniques through other transaction authorities in order to deliver network services to its bases.
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