Homeland Security CTO Gets IT

　　Michael Hermus left the software startup world two-and-a-half years ago to help the U.S. government get smarter about information technology. The chief technology officer of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sees progress in cybersecurity, but there’s still a long road ahead.

　　“It’s a national security priority for the government to get better at tech, and I don’t think everyone understands that yet…We are living in a world where it’s an arms race in an asymmetric situation where the attacker only has to succeed once, but we have to succeed every time,” Hermus said in a fireside chat at an even sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association.

　　DHS has a particularly broad attack surface because it is a mélange of as many as 22 federal entities with 250,000 employees and a $60 billion budget. It oversees cybersecurity in law enforcement as well as government systems, customs, airport security, disaster relief, border patrol and more.

　　“We have a very diverse mission portfolio…but each mission relies on IT…it gets specialized in areas like law enforcement where wearables are big,” including body cameras and vital-sign monitors, he said.

　　Hermus joined the government as part of an Obama Administration initiative to create a digital service modeled on one in the British government. Bureaucracy has been one of the chief impediments to modernizing the government’s use of tech, he said.

　　“Some of our partner countries are further along…and non-nation state actors are not constrained by anything,” he said.

　　Modernizing government’s use of technology has been a combination of practical steps and cultural shifts.

　　“We are overhauling out IT acquisition process to be cloud-first and support agile technologies. We’ve been working on it two years and still have a ways to go,” he said.

　　“In the startup world I came from, everything is risk and there’s an understanding that change is good. But in the federal government, avoiding risk is in the DNA even though it can be counter-productive. Long term, we have to change the way the organization works and thinks,” he added.

　　For example, “we need to be smarter about how we interact with the vendor community,” Hermus said. Toward that goal, DHS set up a Silicon Valley office two years ago and has forged partnerships with venture capitalists. “We are just beginning to tap into the brain power of the community,” he said.

　　Hermus is part of a group of federal CTOs that try to meet monthly to coordinate efforts. “We have to find ways of sharing more best practices at the working level,” he said.

　　Asked what’s on his tech wish list, he pointed to engineering skills including “design thinking, user-centric design and modern development paradigms. We are still on the journey to get to the cloud and become agile,” he said.

　　“AI is a lot of what we do, looking for a needle in a haystack, a bad actor or a bad cargo shipment, so unsupervised learning to detect patterns and anomalies is important for us,” he added.

　　To educate himself, Hermus recently downloaded Google’s TensorFlow tools and started “hacking around with Python…it’s amazing what a single person can do with technology,” he said.