Politics
Air Force CIO to retire after 31 years of federal service
Venice Goodwine, the Department of the Air Force’s chief information officer, is retiring after 31 years of federal service.
Goodwine will leave in mid-May, allowing time for a transition to a new department CIO.
Venice Goodwine, the Department of the Air Force’s chief information officer, is retiring after 31 years of federal service.
In a note sent to staff, Goodwine said she’s looking forward to a period of rest and reflection, but this will just be a break as she plans on returning to the federal community.
“This concludes a rewarding journey through military service, private industry and government leadership,” Goodwine wrote. “It’s been an honor to support our mission, lead technology initiatives and work alongside the exceptional personnel of our Air and Space Forces.”
Jennifer Orozsco, the deputy CIO of the Air Force, will take over on an acting basis after Goodwine retires if a new lead technology executive isn’t in place.
Goodwine became the Department of the Air Force CIO in August 2023. Goodwine spent 10 years on active duty for the Air Force and served 26 years in the reserves, and returned to the service in 2021 as its director of enterprise IT.
During her career, she also worked as the chief information security officer at the Agriculture Department and worked almost for eight years for the Marines Corps in assorted program and project manager roles.
During her time as Air Force CIO, Goodwine has several focus areas, including getting artificial intelligence tools into the hands of airmen and guardians. She signed a memo in 2023 to create an innovation zone within the Air Force’s Office 365 environment that will allow service members to experiment with the technology within a safe environment. That led to the further development of AI tools, including NIPRGPT that lets airmen and guardians experiment, develop and deploy their own AI applications and capabilities.
Goodwine also ensured the Air and Space Forces had the infrastructure to run AI and other tools. She focused on moving the service’s unclassified and classified networks further into the cloud.
For example, Goodwine is leading an initiative to have a single tenant for Office 365 on the secret side, which is different than what the service did with its unclassified version, which had multiple tenants.
“What’s important for my cloud strategy is making sure that I have cloud at the tactical edge. That’s my reliance on commercial cloud services at the edge because if I’m going to have decision advantage, I have to make sure that the data is available. The data needs to be where the warfighter is and the data needs to be in the cloud,” Goodwine said last year. “I don’t intend to put the data in the continental United States (CONUS) when I’m fighting in INDOPACOM. I need the data there. But then I also need the cloud at the edge. I need the data at the edge. I need artificial intelligence to make sense of the data. And it needs to be trusted. So all the attributes, you talk about data, I need all of that there. So it’s not just enterprise IT. It is IT for the warfighter. That’s my mantra and you’ll hear me say that all the time and my team speak that same language.”
Underlying all of these efforts is the Air Force’s Base Infrastructure Modernization initiative, formerly known as enterprise IT-as-a-service (EITaaS) Wave 2.
The Air Force awarded an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for BIM last August to 25 companies with a contract ceiling of $12.5 billion.
The post Air Force CIO to retire after 31 years of federal service first appeared on Federal News Network.
