CXO Tech Forum: Acquisition Innovation

Meagan Metzger is the Co-founder and CEO of Dcode and a General Partner at Dcode Capital. Dcode is a privately-owned advisory firm that helps venture-backed tech companies expand into the federal market, and teaches government agencies how to scout, vet, integrate, and procure great technology. Dcode Capital is a venture capital firm that invests alongside leading venture firms in commercially-successful, high-growth technology companies that can dramatically improve our government.

Throughout her career, Meagan has worked closely with senior leadership at DoD, IC, and civilian agencies, using her expertise to drive innovation. Meagan serves on the Board of Directors for the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF), The Alliance for Commercial Technology in Government, as well as other private sector federal boards.

Dcode is Meagan’s third startup venture all focused on technology in the federal market. Previously she served as a Chief Operating Officer at Effia, a government-focused mobile and cloud company, where she oversaw substantial growth, tripling company profitability in one year. She also led the growth of P3 as the Chief Strategy Officer driving IT and Acquisition support in the federal market. Meagan’s extensive operator experience landed them on the Washington Technology’s Fast 50 for three years in a row.

Meagan holds a degree from The George Washington University in Business Administration and has won several awards including the Washington Business Journal 40 under 40 and the FCW Federal 100 award.

Mr. Todd Simpson serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary, DevSecOps within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Information and Technology. He has 30 years of information technology (IT) leadership and management experience from the private sector and the Federal Government. For the last 15 years, he has led at the executive level focusing on strategic planning, technology modernization, organizational development, and operational efficiency.

Mr. Simpson began his career in the United States Air Force, serving three years active duty and three years active reserve.

He worked in the IT field as a systems analyst, developer, network engineer, IT manager, and Chief Information Officer (CIO) in the private sector for 18 years.

In 2010, Mr. Simpson began his Federal Government career as the CIO for the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division in Washington, D.C. As the CIO, he led the IT and litigation support units, which supported over 2,000 investigators. Under Mr. Simpson’s leadership, the organization reduced the annual IT and litigation support budgets by more than 50 percent, achieved a net annual savings of more than $3 million from data center and server consolidation, and implemented a disaster recovery and continuity of operations solution that increased network and application availability by 22 percent and realized an annual cost savings of $3 million.

In 2014, Mr. Simpson was appointed to the Senior Executive Service (SES) as the Associate Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). His responsibilities included leading the IT Shared Services organization that supported 72,000 users; providing the vision, leadership, and oversight in the development of the strategic direction of DOT’s Common Operating Environment and Enterprise Architecture; as well as IT policy and procedure planning, formulation, and direction.

From 2015 to 2018, Mr. Simpson was the CIO at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington, D.C. In this role, Mr. Simpson was responsible for providing IT services and support to approximately 25,000 federal personnel and contractors that comprised the FDA community throughout the continental United States and internationally. During his time at FDA, Mr. Simpson developed a cloud brokerage model, moved over 10 percent of FDA’s application portfolio to the cloud, modernized technology, fundamentally transformed the agency’s security posture, automated dozens of legacy workflows, and created a true DevOps framework.

In 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services selected Mr. Simpson to be their first Chief Product Officer. In this role, Mr. Simpson provided the Department’s data, cloud, platform, security, and development services. Mr. Simpson also managed the Department’s Vendor Management Office where he consolidated software purchases that gained efficiencies and saved the Department millions of dollars, most notably a VMWare deal that saved the Department $33 million over the next five years.

Mr. Simpson earned a Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS) from Drexel University in Pennsylvania, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Resource Management from Ohio State University, and an Executive Leadership Certificate from Cornell University. Mr. Simpson also holds several Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certifications, a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certification, a Six Sigma Black Belt certification, a strategic planning certification (BSC), a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, and a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) certification.
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Misu Tasnim is the Executive Director of the Digital Service at CMS. In this role she is responsible for leading digital modernization efforts at CMS which promote interoperability and public access to health data. Most recently she has been leading efforts to modernize the Medicare payment system. Misu has worked with CMS since 2013 and is passionate about using technology to improve healthcare.

Prior to CMS, Misu served as an engineer at NASA and the IRS, on flight software, security engineering, and systems architecture. She then turned her focus to small businesses and startups, lending to a breadth of experience in government procurement, building effective teams, and scaling modern software development practices. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.