White House nominates John Sherman for DOD CIO

NOTE: This article first appeared on FCW.com.

President Joe Biden has nominated John Sherman, the Defense Department's acting CIO, to hold the top tech job on a permanent basis.

Sherman was named DOD's principal deputy CIO in 2020 and has been acting in the CIO role since January. Under his leadership at DOD, Sherman has overseen major enterprise initiatives from the coronavirus pandemic-spurred commercial virtual remote telework capability to the cancellation and pivot of the embattled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract.

Sherman, who has spent 25 years in national security, was previously the CIO for the intelligence community in the Office of the Director for National Intelligence during the Trump administration. He also served as the deputy director for the CIA's Open Source Enterprise and as a deputy national intelligence officer on the National Intelligence Council.

Sherman will step down as acting CIO during the confirmation process. Dr. Kelly E. Fletcher will serve as acting CIO and David McKeown, currently DOD's chief information security officer, will act as principal deputy CIO.

The Defense Department's CIO was restored to a Senate-confirmed position in 2019.

The White House also nominated Nickolas Guertin to be the director of operational test and evaluation at DOD. Guertin was most recently in academia as a software-reliant and cyber-physical systems researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute.

Guertin's career spans four decades and includes military and civilian service in submarine operations, systems engineering and the development and testing of weapons, sensors and combat management products.