Politics
Dunkin broke down longstanding barriers as Energy’s CIO
When Ann Dunkin became the Energy Department’s chief information officer back in 2021, she got a call from one of her predecessors. Dunkin said that person told her Energy’s unofficial motto was “you’re not the boss of me.”
Nearly four years later, Energy’s long-time narrative has changed.
Ann Dunkin is the former CIO at the Energy Department.
“The environment that you go into at Energy is you’ve got semi-autonomous and autonomous organizations and all have different relationships with headquarters. So when I arrived, everyone kept asking me what my plan was and what I wanted to accomplish? I kept saying, essentially, I didn’t know, because you have all these independent organizations that are explaining to you exactly why they don’t have to do what you tell them,” Dunkin said during an “exit” interview on Ask the CIO. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say we got rid of separate email addresses or sub domains, or we got rid of different development environments, but what we did do was build collaboration in that space. For example, we had 57-58 tenants from Office 365. Now we’ve got 55 tenants. We’re down a few because we got rid of a couple.”
Through that effort, Dunkin said Energy signed an enterprise software deal with Microsoft so at least every lab and office has a vehicle with a common set of terms and conditions.
“That got really, really hairy due to some delays at the General Services Administration and some delays in our contracting shop; we were down to the last day, literally, to get that contract done. We had some folks who were ready to pull out of that contract, go do their own thing, and we held them together, and everybody is under the same contract,” she said. “We are saving 19% across DoE, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money, until you realize that’s a couple hundred million dollars over five years.”
To achieve these goals, Dunkin said first her team had to listen to what the challenges of the labs and offices were, and then second had to create trust and confidence that they would provide the service as well or better than the organizations could do it for themselves.
“We had some folks say, ‘take our email, take our infrastructure at some level.’ For example, my office was taking over a lot of the infrastructure at the [National Nuclear Security Administration] site offices. We took over some of the unclassified operations, which was a part of building that trust and confidence,” she said. “I will not tell you that every single person in DoE came to the table and said, ‘Let’s go do stuff together.’ But enough of them came that we built a pretty good coalition of the willing to do things, and really were able to strengthen those relationships, not just among the federal folks, but actually even more so with the labs, plants and sites with contractor organizations.”
Common tools, common structure
Another piece to breaking down the barriers to create collaboration across Energy was developing common tools. Dunkin said Energy didn’t have a strong low-code, no-code development capability when she arrived in 2021, but soon created one, first to help with COVID vaccination attestations and then later to help the IRS implement certain provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act.
“They got to the point where other departments were looking at us and saying, ‘we’d rather you do it than us if we’re going to work together.’ So that was a great example of how we really moved the needle in terms of our capabilities,” she said. “We also just created a lot more structure around how we did the work, having a really clear intake process, having a change control committee, having a prioritization process for new projects so that we could make sure that we could deliver those things we said we were going to do because we had the right resources. Across the entire organization, everyone was working on the same things.”
While most of the low-code, no-code development is done by vendors, Dunkin said she ensured federal employees had the right skillsets to manage those projects.
She said before she left Energy every part of the CIO’s team improved, from the operations team to the security team to the development team.
Aligning funding with security needs
Dunkin specifically called out the improvements around cybersecurity in securing more than just the headquarters infrastructure, but in managing security across the entire agency.
“Everybody had their own security activities, but our security operations center (SOC) was responsible for understanding where everybody was communicating with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, sharing out with the organization and making sure that not only was the strategy across the organization moving forward, but the day-to-day operations were going well,” she said. “One of the great things that we did in terms of collaboration was when we stood up the program management office (PMO), which I don’t want to give a lot of shout outs, but I’ll give this one to Amy Hamilton, who led that PMO, to really organize our work across DoE. One of the cool things they did was that we set it up so that we had a little bit of money, but we got money, like many agencies did after the SolarWinds incident, and managed to make that recurring funding for security improvements. Instead of keeping that in the office of the CIO in a given year, half to two-thirds of it went out to the rest of the organization. We’d say, here’s some money for your project, and then you have to write a paper, do a brown bag or do something to tell everybody exactly what you did so that they can go do that too. That was a great way to really leverage that funding, and we aligned it to critical needs across the organization each year.”
Now that she’s out of government, for a second time — Dunkin also served as the CIO at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration — she plans to work part-time Georgia Tech University as a distinguished professor of the practice and a distinguished external fellow across the School of Public Policy and the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy.
She also is serving on some advisory boards and doing some advising for people. Dunkin also plans to write a book.
The post Dunkin broke down longstanding barriers as Energy’s CIO first appeared on Federal News Network.
