The chief information officer (CIO) at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) laid out his team’s priorities for fiscal year (FY) 2025 with modernization, cybersecurity, and IT expansion topping the list.
During the Nextgov/FCW and Route Fifty Cloud Summit on Thursday, Jimmy Hall said that his three priorities as CIO go “hand in hand” with the bureau’s larger goals.
Hall wears three hats within the State Department, serving as the CIO of the INR, the director of the INR’s Office of Technology and Innovation, and the intelligence CIO for the entire department.
“In terms of CIO, I have three pillars that I’m after over the next year,” Hall said. “That’s modernizing our IT ecosystem – which goes hand in hand with what … the bureau’s goals are, especially when you look at it in terms of digital transformation.”
“Also, I’m focused on securing that IT ecosystem. And you talk about the [department’s] global aspects – in my mind, modernization and security goes hand in hand. And then lastly, I want to expand our IT ecosystem,” he said.
According to Hall, expanding and strengthening INR’s cloud presence is a top priority for the CIO’s third pillar: expending the IT ecosystem.
“I will tell you we’re not where we want to be,” Hall said. “When I first arrived here, we did not have a TS [top secret] cloud presence. We do have a TS cloud presence now. So, we’ve stepped into the cloud arena. It’s that win-win.”
The CIO said that INR has begun to look at emerging technology – like artificial intelligence (AI) – as “an asset and benefit to what we want to do.”
“I would want AI to help us in terms of looking at our logs. I would want AI to help us in terms of tracking – IDing threats early on. I would even want AI to help us from a traffic analysis perspective,” Hall said. “All of that rolled together will allow us to provide that premier TS/SCI [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] service for the State Department, but at the same time modernize IT ecosystems. So, I’m looking at those emerging technologies from that perspective.”
Hall also noted that INR still has work to do when it comes to leveraging AI for cybersecurity.
“I want to get better on the cybersecurity front of looking at logs. I want to get better at how we use our user activity monitoring and the way we use humans and automation together,” Hall said. “We got a ways to go there. Definitely not where we want to be, but that’s my goal.”
Hall’s top technology priorities for FY25 are in line with what other Federal CIOs have keyed on for this year, according to recent research out by MeriTalk.
For our inaugural study, “Tech Tonic: FY25 Federal CIO Forecast,” we found that cybersecurity, workforce transformation, and AI rank as the top technology priorities in the Federal government. Other FY25 priorities include zero trust; digital government and citizen experience; cloud computing; infrastructure modernization; and data management.
