Digital Services: Disruptive DevSecOps

Dr. Brian Hermann is the Director and Program Executive Officer for the Services Development Directorate. He is responsible for the development and acquisition of Information Technology services for the Department of Defense. His three portfolios encompass DoD-wide enterprise services and unified capabilities, business systems, and warfighting command and control capabilities.

Dr. Brian G. Hermann previously served at the Defense Information Systems Agency as the Chief of the Enterprise Services Development Division and Manager of the Unified Capabilities portfolio. He was responsible for developing and implementing information technology services and strategies for unification of communications and collaboration services for the DoD-Wide Enterprise.

A retired U.S. Air Force Communications and Cyber Officer, Dr. Hermann has served in a variety of communications, acquisition-related, software, test and evaluation, information technology, and educational positions. He developed techniques for evaluating software product maturity and reliability used for major acquisition programs including JSTARS, the CV-22, and the E-3 Radar System Improvement Program for the AWACS. He also has extensive experience teaching systems and software engineering, delivering information technology services, and leading educational departments. As a National Defense Fellow, he published research on a normative U.S. Government response to cyber-attacks.

In his final active duty tour, Colonel Hermann led DISA’s Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) program’s collaboration services team and served as the Chief of DISA’s Enterprise Applications Services Division.

He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on Software Engineering from Arizona State University. He is also a graduate of the Air War College, the College of Naval Command and Staff, and the Air Force Institute of Technology.

After military retirement, Dr. Hermann spent several years in industry before rejoining the government in July 2016.

Edmond Kuqo specializes in large scale enterprise systems, mobile solutions, data analytics, enterprise resource planning and software application development and delivery. Edmond focused on open source technologies and many newly emerged open source tools with emphasis on CI/CD automation, RMF cATO, Zero Trust Architecture, DevSecOps, Agile & AI/ML. He is a hands-on practical leader with experience in developing and delivering enterprise systems for on-prem and cloud deployments with emphasis on cybersecurity and Cyber Ready.

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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