Former Air Force CTO Jay Bonci Exit Interview: Selling the Story of Tech

Jay Bonci stepped down as Air Force CTO earlier this month after three years in the role. Bonci led the Air Force’s enterprise IT portfolio and developed a series of roadmaps, including recent plans covering workforce, future networks and identity, credential, and access management.

Bonci sat down for an exit interview with GovCIO Media & Research to discuss what he learned in the position, his next steps and why public service needs technologists like him.

Looking back, what makes you feel most proud about your time as Air Force CTO?

Bonci: It was a great kind of three years in the department. Coming into the job, Lauren [Knausenberger] really gave me the leeway to kind of make the job my own. It was vital that I was able to take a look at the entire problem space of the enterprise and apply some kind of critical thinking to it, to understand where those efforts are best applied and where we need to really focus, like monitoring implementation and really drive into more specifics on strategy.

The challenges of the enterprise are that it is a constant battle for accurate strategic information to move up and down the chain, in part because Pentagon incentives are very building-focused… The position before me in the office of the CIO was really focused on science and technology and the kind of future of tech. Questions like, “What are we going to do in a post quantum crypto world?” There’s no lack of good targets to go after in the space. Principally, it was being a strategic voice, like the technical narrator for the enterprise to be able to tell a consistent story of how these programs are supposed to work together. How is the enterprise supposed to support battle management? How is, how is zero trust going to come together

We really got out in front of zero trust. Zero trust kind of broke the brain of the enterprise. Zero trust is an architectural imperative, it is not a thing you can buy. It’s a diffuse requirement that goes across programs and weapon systems and the endpoint and business systems.

The phrase I hear a lot is “zero trust is a journey, not a product.”

Bonci: That’s right. It’s obviously supported very well by commercial products and a lot of commercial best practice. But, it takes a lot to get there. It’s really important for us to get that journey correct. We did a lot [on zero-trust implementation and] we were able to save millions on our acquisitions. It made a huge impact.

I miss everybody there. I’ll miss working with the most mission-driven people who wanted to do the right thing for the department and the country. It was a great few years. I learned a lot.

How did you get everybody on board on something like zero trust or modernization?

Bonci: A lot of it was understanding and internalizing the concept that progress is often gated by how quickly an idea can transmit through a bureaucracy. How difficult is it to to take a concept and get people on board? How much time do you have to spend in strategic communication? How much time do you have to spend in building these products that you put out, internally and externally? What are the right strategy documents that you assemble?

We came up with this process building roadmaps, which are this combination between a strategy and an implementation plan. We want to bring together a good view of what the enterprise needs to do – in timing and sequencing – to execute. The important part of doing that to drive understanding around the nuances and the program interconnectedness. But it was also an opportunity to sit down with the various programs and get them to say, “hey, we don’t quite know what the policy on this is,” or “we were not quite sure what to do here.”

It gave us the opportunity to bring a bunch of people in a room and, we called it, cleaning out the garage. We asked: “What are all the things that we don’t understand? What are all the things that we need to do? How do we take that and create like a workable product out of it and create something that has strategic communications value for the enterprise?” It was a really important thing for us to engage in and it provided so much value.

What I tell everybody is that this process will continue in a couple of different forms, with the people who are still there. The value of road mapping is, as the joke goes, the friends we made along the way. The value is that process that you put together and the discussions that you have, forcing you to think about the timing, sequencing and deliverables. Any organization can benefit from taking that strategic pause to figure out what tight looks like. And I’m very happy that we are able to accomplish that by using the kind of the power of the office of the CIO to drive that discussion for everybody.

Before you came into the Air Force CTO job, you were in the private sector. What drew you to this job and to public service? What were the challenges that you wanted to face and what were the kind of goals that you wanted to accomplish?

Bonci: What drew me to this job was the sense of wanting to build and wanting to contribute to the success of the country and the success of the mission in a direct way. I started off in the private sector. I had worked with government people for a long time. I never had any ambitions of working in government whatsoever.

I sort of fell into this space through my previous job at Akamai, where they thought of government as a custom opportunity. I was getting more in the space and got kind of addicted to that mission and addicted to the impact and being able to do something that I felt was, ultimately, very meaningful. It was a privilege to get to know those people. And, from a civic curiosity perspective, to understand how the mechanics of government try and deliver outcomes for the country.

What goals did you have going into the CTO job? How did you pursue them?

Bonci: I wanted to learn how to navigate and lead by influence in a large organization. As a CTO, I didn’t have direct reports. There are statutory calls for things like Principal Cyber Advisor, and other advisors in the CIO office, but there isn’t a call out for CTOs. How do I take the positional power of the Office of the CIO and drive that through influence to generate meaningful outcomes? That was the challenge.

I said, “It’s going to force me to sharpen my communication skills. It’s going to force me to really listen to our customers and understand what they need from us.” Again, it was a really good experience and and really helped me broaden my skill set in things like storytelling, strategic communication, polishing the message, and driving the way forward by having a good idea.

Sales gets a bad rap and a lot of engineers don’t want to be in sales, even though sales is what drives the company forward. But sales is the art of storytelling. It’s the art of describing people’s problems, describing value and describing and transmitting credibility. The CTO is very much a narrator and a salesperson for the enterprise and what the enterprise should be doing and how the enterprise should be doing. It was very much like an extension of sales and narration skills. It was really this challenge for personal growth and an opportunity to serve.

How did your private sector experience at Akamai color your experience at Air Force?

Bonci: It was good because I came in knowing a lot of players. Akamai was a service provider to [Defense Information Systems Agency], so I came in knowing a lot about internal data architecture, like how the thing is actually wired together. It would be very difficult for a person coming in cold from the outside to be able to make meaningful change, because you’d sort of spend the first year learning where the bathrooms are in the building. But I also had a sense of how commercial best practices can be translated into a government context, like even giving ourselves permission to say, “Yeah, we don’t know this thing, but we’re going to figure it out later.”

And not getting stuck on something or not getting paralyzed by analysis and having the right cultural mindset of, like, yeah, we can change your mind on this stuff. It’s going to be okay. Military and civilian personnel incentives are not good with handling uncertainty, but uncertainty is the nature of delivering technology. Having that anchor and the confidence to work through that stuff was really beneficial in the space.

What are your next steps? What is your plan for the future?

Bonci: I started a new role as the SVP and GM for systems of data at Clarity Innovations. We’re a mid-size mission-focused defense firm based out of Columbia, Maryland, serving the DOD, IC and a smattering of some defensive capabilities. I’m taking the kind of lessons I’ve learned from how to pilot those kind of big organizations in the DOD and I’m going over from the tech side more to the business side. Where Clarity is growing at a pretty fast pace, and making sure that the company can grow and scale at the rate it needs to and not kind of lose its soul in the process. I came over to Clarity because of the strength of the culture and the excellence of the people and the results that they’ve been able to deliver. The Lego blocks that make up the company are amazing and second to none.

It’s a matter of being able to tell that story about growth. How do we make sure that our customers know where we’re going? How to make sure that our engineers and portfolio leads and people who are hands-on-keyboard delivering outcomes for the country. There’s it’s a lot of the same skills that I picked up and polished over the last few years as Air Force CTO. I’m looking forward to continuing to support the warfighter and support the country’s priorities from the mission system side.

I would encourage anybody who’s thinking about it to seriously consider government service. It was a great experience. Public service is a great learning experience for anybody who’s curious about how the country actually works under the hood and they can gain a greater appreciation and understanding of the wheels of government, It was a great experience for me. I’m so happy that I did it.

For us to be successful as a country, we need more “dual citizens.” We need people who are going to come in from the outside and really put their time and energy into helping to make things better. Our government civilians and our people in uniform are incredibly dedicated and incredibly focused on driving those outcomes. It’s going to take the whole of country approach for us to continue to be successful. Anybody who has either served near government or has an interest in civic tech should consider taking a turn in public service.