When Barry Tanner became the deputy chief information officer for the Department of the Navy, he had a plan to be a bulldozer when it came to obstacles in the way of the operational and mission offices.

Tanner had led the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services and experienced some frustrations that he wanted to reduce or remove.

But over time, Tanner said he found a new perspective on why some technology policies and procedures are in place.

Barry Tanner is the deputy CIO for the Department of the Navy.

“I’m still very passionate about [removing blockers]. But when you get into the role and you take a look at it, the perspective changes enough that you say, ‘okay, but I have to make sure that what we’re doing here doesn’t impact all these other things that I was not aware of when I was down at that execution level.’ The balance is important, but at the same time the challenges are all very similar,” Tanner said during an interview on Ask the CIO at the West 2025 conference sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute.

“[Navy CIO] Jane Rathbun, my boss, likes to talk a lot about enterprise services as a focus of our organization because, at the end of the day, everybody has to do certain things. They all need certain services and certain functions. We shouldn’t have to build them multiple times. There may be good reasons to have more than one, but, and this is just one example, as you go through convincing people to trust that when you build something like that, it will be there when they need it is a big part of this job,” he said. “and so I’ve spent a lot of time over the first few months connecting with those stakeholders, understanding their needs, understanding their concerns, and then going back to the people executing that I know from my former life, and saying, ‘Hey, we need to take this into account. We need to understand how it’s going to be resilient, how it’s going to make the user experience better.’”

For many organizations, building a better user experience means wanting or needing more money and resources. But Tanner said one of the things he’s learned — and where enterprise services play a big role — is that more money and people aren’t always necessary.

He said the Navy’s Cattle Drive initiative to reduce the number of duplicative or outdated systems can be a well paved avenue to find that necessary funding.

“We’re really good about building new things, but we really bad about turning things off. One of those things that frustrated me when I was at that acquisition level was having the ability as an acquisition organization to say that’s going away on this time frame, so that I can repurpose that and I can move it over, and then having some stakeholder tell me, ‘No and that has to stay there,’” he said. “When I got to this level, one of the first things I was going to make sure that happens was Cattle Drive. One of the things that I think acquisition can get a lot better at is communicating and connecting with the people who need to do the work, and explaining to them how they can continue doing it with the new thing.”

Targeting 55-60 business systems

Operation Cattle Drive began in 2020 and aims to eliminate redundant systems and applications across the Department of Navy. Tanner said the focus for 2025 is around the business mission area.

“There a lot of legacy systems that are being consolidated into larger platforms, and so we continue to partner very closely with the financial management and controller team on making sure that the enterprise resourcing planning (ERP) and some of these other larger platforms are bringing more capabilities and functions into those so we can sunset the old ones,” he said. “Those systems support a lot of things that we care about, not just turning off the old thing, but also eliminating vulnerabilities.”

He said the Navy has aggressive targets for reductions over the next year, turning off between 55 and 60 legacy systems.

DON CIO Rathbun said last fall that Operation Cattle Drive had retired or decommissioned about 30 systems and applications since 2022.

Tanner said some of the systems or applications will be easier than others because they are either niche, built for a specific function, or so old that they are real cyber risks.

“In order to achieve that, the place that the function goes has got to be ready, and so we put a lot of pressure on our partners and the PEOs who are building those platforms to bring the functionality to bear. A lot of challenges in the IT world are about how you effectively operate those kinds of things or secure them,” he said. “Cattle Drive dovetails with our Cyber Ready program too and with our other modernization initiatives, because if you don’t have the thing ready in time to turn off the old thing, then the greatest plan in the world doesn’t happen. We’ve had our bumps in the road over the last couple years with aggressive targets not being met. But this year again, we’re going to shoot high and we’re going get to where we can learn and iterate again.”

Tanner said the ongoing communication with the PEOs, like they are doing with Operation Cattle Drive, is part of the cultural change he’s pursuing to break down barriers to modernization.

“The new thing that we’re doing, what is it replacing? What is this intended to replace? How have you engaged with the people who are your customers to help them understand how their life will change when you do this?” he said. “There are plenty of examples of that across the board, but if we don’t get after that part, then this idea of Cattle Drive and this idea of divest to invest and all this other stuff like that gets 10 times harder.”

Creating a feedback loop

A key factor in the success of Cattle Drive and Operation Flank Speed, the Navy’s implementation of Office 365 platform in the cloud, is the development of the Navy’s champions network.

Tanner said there are thousands of sailors, seamen and civilians across the service who want to learn about the technology and move faster to use it.

“These early adopters, folks who really understand the imperative for change and want to be our partners in it. But they don’t work for a PEO or they don’t work for it. They’re just the users. They’re part of the community,” he said. “[The champions network has] taken on a life of its own. We intended for it to be a very focused effort around the transition to Flank Speed, but it has continued because the platform continues to evolve, and they are a huge part of our overall strategy for change management across the Navy. It sometimes can backfire a little bit. You tend to lean on them too hard, and they’ll let you know really quickly that, ‘Hey, that’s not my job. I’m happy to help. I love this stuff, but I’ve got a real job and I’m doing other things.’ So, we have to balance that. We’ve learned that the hard way a couple of times. But it is an essential lesson we’ve learned to engage with that community, wherever it is, as part of the change management process and have them a part of the plan.”

In addition to Operation Cattle Drive, Tanner said the DoN is focused on reducing its technical debt, particularly of its underlying telecommunications network infrastructure.

Related to that is the other priority of continued move to the cloud.

“We’ve done great things in the cloud. We’ve moved a lot of really cool things into the cloud. You still have to get to that cloud. So really focusing on base infrastructure modernization, similar to our Air Force counterparts, we’re going after this in a big way,” he said. “We’re learning a lot of good lessons from them, so we’re taking those on board and we’re trying to get after it at scale. This is hard work.”

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