Fire Side Chat with FBI CIO, Gordon Bitko
I recently had the opportunity to host Dr Gordon Bitko, CIO of the FBI, on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce. I sat down with Gordon, who agreed to take my questions and those of the audience. As CIO, Gordon is supporting the FBI’s 50,000 employees, partners, and contractors; provides oversight of almost $1.5B in annual expenditures; and has a team of more than 5,000 FBI information technology personnel.
The technology challenges for the FBI
Gordon spoke about issues ranging from the challenges of information sharing between US law enforcement and security agencies post 9/11, the challenge of digital transformation in a large and geographically diverse organisation and his approach as a CIO to IT as a tool for an organisation to do its job – and in his case, support the FBI’s field agents and investigators in identifying and catching perpetrators of crime.
Dr Bitko talks about the challenges to meet the need for speed, securing the data and the needs of the mission. The CIO’s team adopts “the carrot and stick approach” which manages and chooses from the various cloud solutions available to the organisation. You “don’t need to go build and buy your own technology” instead Dr Bitko’s team encourages using companies that have all of that for you. That way you focus on securing the data and the accessing it when you need to.
While Gordon is clearly in a unique organisation with elevated pressures and responsibilities, his reflections struck a chord with many of the conversations I have had with the CIO’s of our Australian Government client organisations. While we could not get Gordon to Canberra, we were able to provide the next best thing, and a video of his presentation and fire-side chat - available here.
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About Macquarie Government: Macquarie Government is a division of the Macquarie Telecom Group (ASX MAQ). It provides services to Federal and State Government agencies, including Secure Internet and Secure Cloud services. Above blog post first published here. #CyberSecurity