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New Army CIO: No More Business as Usual

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Army CIO/G-6 Susan Lawrence, Photo: army.mil

It’s a common expression when a new boss takes: “She has her work cut out for her.”

Often, it’s merely a rhetorical flourish.

However, in the case of recently appointed Army Chief Information Officer/G-6 Lt. Gen. Susan  Lawrence, it’s likely an apt expression.

“We’ve got to change culture, solutions and paradigm,” she said last week at an AFCEA NOVA event, according to Federal Computer Week. “We cannot deliver the network like we used to anymore. We can’t build unique networks every time we deploy something else. We cannot continue to do business as usual as we did in the past, and we cannot continue to buy IT as we did in the past.”

When the Army announced her appointment, Lawrence said a key priority was network modernization.

But the Army has also undertaken ambitious IT moves, such as an enterprise email migration, which Lawrence acknowledged had had its share of “false starts.”

“[B]ut it’s working, and it’s working well,” she added.

In addition, efforts to modernize, operationalize and streamline the network allow for a little spring cleaning, Lawrence suggested.

There are “thousands and thousands of applications that are hanging on by a string just because 10 people are using it,” she said, according to FierceGovernmentIT. “We’ve got a lot of house cleaning.”

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