DOW CIO Highlights a ‘Common Sense’ Approach for the Military’s Technology
DOW CIO Highlights a ‘Common Sense’ Approach for the Military’s Technology
Publish Date: 2026-06-02 08:00:00
Source Domain: www.afcea.org
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. The U.S. Department of War Chief Information Office has a cybersecurity operator as its chief information officer (CIO), Kirsten Davies. A longtime CISO, including as Unilever’s global CISO for its enterprise across 190 countries, Davies is viewing things from an operator’s perspective. This is informing her strategies and priorities, with the office having less of a policy stance, she told SIGNAL in an interview June 2 at AFCEA International’s TechNet Cyber 2026 conference.
“You are seeing a lot of enthusiasm around cybersecurity, and the cybersecurity nerd in me from my background loves this,” Davies stated. “So, you are going to be seeing a lot more of a holistic approach to how we do cyber defense, how we train and uplift our cybersecurity providers across the department, and with a lot of existing interagency partnerships that we are building on.”
Davies is from a U.S. Army family, with her father having served in Vietnam. Her work experience before, however, was not necessarily in the defense industrial base.
“This is new for me, and I wanted to make sure that I captured the ethos of warfighters, that I captured the spirit of the department and married that to the direction from the president and from the secretary,” Davies said. “Even when I was at Booz Allen, I was on the commercial side, so I haven’t really had any exposure to this world at all.”
As such, Davies spent the first weeks of her tenure as CIO on a listening and learning tour, hearing from industry and military leaders. “I wanted to be very thoughtful about my approach and make sure I didn’t just go, ‘Oh, I know this, and we’re going to do that.’ Let me learn a few things, and I’m glad I did.”
The first announcement from Davies is a five-year $9.7 billion Microsoft Enterprise Software Agreement with Dell Federal Systems executed by the CIO’s office. As a result, end-users and organizations in the department will have a streamlined experience for software, licenses and usage, Davies said.
The effort will greatly simplify the enterprise experience by providing a single point of contact, eliminating different price points and getting rid of different start and end times in its license expiration terms, amongst other improvements.
“It is an enterprise capability for our Microsoft licenses and the usage of Microsoft across the department,” Davies said. “We had different pricing and different contracts everywhere. We are a very, very large organization, and it is easy for that to happen, of course, because we have so many different military services. Bringing this all together into one setup under one blanket contract agreement, it consolidates all of the licensing negotiation into one.”
