Air Force Appoints New Chief Information Officer

The Air Force has named Venice Goodwine, director of enterprise information technology for the past two years, its next chief information officer. Goodwine succeeds Lauren Knausenberger, who had held the position since 2020.

Goodwine, who has nearly three decades of information technology experience, will oversee the service’s enterprise information technology, data and artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity directives. The portfolio Goodwine will now shepherd is valued at approximately $17 billion, according to the department. As the service’s CIO, Goodwine will lead 20,000 cyber operations and support personnel around the world.

Goodwine’s appointment comes as the office is actively working on its zero-trust implementation journey. The service released its zero-trust strategy earlier this year with a goal to implement the architecture by 2027. Zero trust will make the implementation of the Defense Department’s Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control (JADC2) concept possible, as well as the service’s cloud modernization efforts.

Last year, the Air Force released its CIO strategy, highlighting the office’s priorities through fiscal year 2028. The strategy’s lines of efforts include accelerating cloud adoption, IT portfolio management and workforce development.

Before her role as the director of enterprise information technology at the Air Force, Goodwine served as the chief information security officer at the Department of Agriculture, managing $208 million in cybersecurity spending annually. She has a long military career, joining the Air Force in 1986 as a signals intelligence analyst, then moving to the Air Force Reserve in 2003 as a communication and information officer until she retired from uniformed military service in 2022.