DOD’s Cyber Academic Engagement Office Centralizes Operations to Drive Efficiency

The Defense Department’s Cyber Academic Engagement Office (CAEO) will tackle centralization and collaboration as part of its 2025 strategy to streamline operations and offerings, Dr. Diba Hadi, principal director of the office, said at the 2025 DOD Cyber Workforce Summit at the National Defense University.

“We have too many processes. We have too many programs, too many scholarship programs, too many grant programs, too many research projects throughout DOD,” Hadi said during the summit. “How do we simplify and have one system, one process, where our partners, our students in the communities know that this is DOD?”

The strategy comes amid the Trump administration’s calls for efficiency and federal workforce reform. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum on March 28 realigning the Defense Department’s civilian workforce. The memo states that DOD seeks to reduce duplicative efforts and remove excessive bureaucracy through a workforce analysis. It also calls for automation through tech solutions to drive speed.

Merging Academic Engagements Across the Defense Department

As part of the CAEO’s centralization effort, the office is finding ways to merge academic engagements spread throughout the services under one roof to better oversee and manage them.

“We do know that there are a lot of academic engagements throughout the services. Hence, we are trying to find out what they are and try to merge every one of those activities too, if it is academic engagements, we will tie them to NCAE, the National Centers of Academic Excellence,” Hadi said.

The CAEO bridges the gap between the academic world and the Defense Department through a network of scholarships and grant programs designed to integrate recent graduates into the DOD upon completion of their studies.

Boosting Collaboration to Minimize Duplication

Hadi said her office is building better communication pipelines in and outside of the DOD to resolve these duplications in work and make the office run more efficiently.

“The second goal that we are focusing on is, how do we improve communication and collaboration amongst ourselves? Externally, how do we do that with our academic institutions? How do we do that with industry? How do we do that with our other government partners?”

The CAEO has moved toward streamlining its processes since Hadi stepped into the role as principal director in Aug. 2024, following the office’s creation in June of the same year.

“The vision is changing. It’s growing. But one of our visions is to increase our personnel to be able to do the job that we have been asked to do, so hopefully we can increase that,” Hadi told the audience.

Leveraging Research Findings to Improve Services

Research will be a priority in 2025 as the CAEO solicits feedback from DOD offices and academia. Hadi said the office will drive data collection with a “system of systems” that will assist in centralizing data available to universities, students, the DOD and select partners.

“There’s a lot that we all can learn from one another, and that is the goal of this office, to make sure that we are learning and that very improving processes, customer service is very centric to everything that we do at CAEO,” Hadi said. “I will promote that throughout my career, my tenure, to make sure that we are receiving feedback directly or through tools from every single one of the partners.

Hadi’s work is a major component of the DOD’s Cyber Workforce Strategy to hire and retain talent. The strategy calls for faster hiring times and better incentives to retain talent, as well as a rethinking of qualifications needed to be hired within the DOD.