Ms. Priscilla Guthrie began work at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) this week as Associate Director of National Intelligence and Intelligence Community Chief Information Officer (CIO). Guthrie, a former Deputy CIO at the Department of Defense, will help lead the Intelligence Community’s (IC) strategy to strengthen sharing, integration and management of information across 16 intelligence agencies.
“Priscilla’s skill in IT and background in management of a large organization well qualify her to further advance our information-sharing goals,” said Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair. “Her prior experience in information management issues unique to national security brings additional strength to this challenge. I look forward to working closely with her and to her contributions to the Intelligence Community.”
The CIO’s office is responsible for establishing common information technology standards across the Intelligence Community and for directing and managing all IT related procurement for the IC. The CIO is also tasked with developing IT architecture to support information sharing policies and objectives throughout the Intelligence Community.
Before joining the ODNI, Guthrie was the Director of the Information Technology and Systems Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers to provide objective analyses of national security issues.
From 2001 to 2006, Guthrie served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Department of Defense where she was responsible for information support to deployed forces. Prior to her position at the Pentagon, Guthrie was a Vice President at TRW, Inc., where she established and led a small, global unit responsible for driving new IT technology into the company’s business.
Guthrie was nominated to this position by President Obama on March 20, 2009, and confirmed by the United States Senate on May 21, 2009. She holds a B.S. from Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. from Marymount College.
The machines at the little news paper in Colorado were all networked together on a Novel network that ran on coaxial cable. And it crashed frequently.
Actually it was. I got the “intranet” machines with the old Ethernet cards in place of modem cards, and the network was hard-wired together with no outside portals. It was time consuming — puting everything through the “scrubber” going from the outside world to the trusted net (and nothing from the trusted net going to the internet machines), but as I say, we were never breeched.
Careful TV, I was a card carrying CNE for a long time 🙂
Was that back in the old Novel Network days?
She sounds like a good one. I would like to see something of a background in counter-cyber activities, although in her position at DoD I assume she was involved in that.
When I was running political campaigns, I set up an in-house secure intranet of machines that didn’t even have modems; one stand-alone machine (also modem-free) whose only task was to scrub foreign files (coming in on disk or downloaded from the internet) of malware; and a series of internet machines. Only then did I feel I had a trusted network … God knows how to do it across an entity the size of a national government flung across the globe.