Danielle Metz

Chief Information Technology (IT) Strategist, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)

U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)

Ms. Danielle Metz is a member of the Senior Executive Service and currently serves as the Chief IT Strategist leading an assessment of the OSD IT landscape on behalf of the Director of Administration & Management. In this capacity, she will assess the quality and management of IT to determine if the highest levels of DoD leadership have access to a modern user experience to execute their mission, which will result in a set of recommendations for significant and enduring improvements.

Prior to this, Ms. Metz served as the Deputy DoD CIO for the Information Enterprise where she provided oversight, policy guidance, and digital expertise for DoD enterprise infrastructure initiatives driving toward the objectives of digital modernization. She led Department-wide execution of strategic guidance and capabilities that included IT reform initiatives, consolidating common IT across Defense Agencies and DoD Field Activities; the successful transition of the temporary collaboration capability adopted during COVID-19 to the enduring DoD365 cloud solution; and software modernization, transforming the Department toward the faster and more secure delivery of quality software.

In her previous experience, Ms. Metz served as a policy advisor to the Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Executive Office of the President leading implementation of IT modernization efforts across the Federal Government. She was the Deputy Director for DoD Information Network Modernization under the Office of the DoD CIO leading implementation of DoD’s enterprise mid-point cybersecurity solution. As a senior manager and IT specialist with the Defense Information Systems Agency, Ms. Metz spearheaded initiatives to improve DoD’s ability to protect and defend the network. Her experience includes budget planning, acquisition, policy development, and program management for large enterprise efforts such as the IT reform initiatives under the National Defense Strategy reform line of effort (i.e., cloud migration, network optimization, and office productivity and collaboration implementation for Defense Agencies and DoD Field Activities); DoD’s Single Security Architecture and Joint Regional Security Stack; and DoD’s perimeter network defense.

Ms. Metz holds a Masters in Economics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Georgia. In addition to her numerous awards, she was recently named the 2021 FedScoop 50 Federal Leadership recipient and an FCW 2020 Federal 100 awardee.

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