Sherman to become third straight IC CIO with connections back to CIA

Reporter's Notebook

Sherman to become third straight IC CIO with connections back to CIA

John Sherman is moving from his role as the CIA’s deputy director of its open-source enterprise to be the new intelligence community CIO.

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

August 21, 2017 4:17 am

2 min read

The White House once again tapped a CIA veteran to be the next chief information officer of the intelligence community.

President Donald Trump announced Aug. 18 he intends to appoint John Sherman, the CIA’s deputy director of its open-source enterprise, to be the new IC CIO.

Sherman joins former CIOs Al Tarasiuk and Ray Cook, the last two IC CIOs, as having spent time at the CIA.

President Barack Obama named Cook in July 2015, after Tarasiuk retired the April before. Since Cook left in January, Jennifer Kron, the deputy CIO of the intelligence community, has been acting.

Sherman will join the ODNI after spending the last several years in the CIA helping to incorporate open source intelligence and capabilities into the IC IT Enterprise (ICITE).

Sherman has spent his entire 20-plus year career in the intelligence community, first working as a satellite imagery analyst and manager and working as a duty officer in the White House situation room.

He also worked in several senior executive positions at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in areas of analysis, collection, homeland security, agency transformation, and foreign partnerships. Additionally, Sherman served as the principal deputy national intelligence officer for military issues on the National Intelligence Council.

As the IC CIO, Sherman’s main priority will be to bring the ICITE initiative to full operational capability. ODNI started ICITE in 2012 as an umbrella program of several small projects with the goal of standardizing the IT infrastructure for all 17 intelligence agencies at the TS-SCI level to improve efficiency, information sharing and cybersecurity.

The IC agencies leading each of the initiatives have made quite a bit of progress to date. For example, the National Security Agency is offering a government-provided cloud, or GovCloud, and the CIA launched C2S, a commercially operated cloud from Amazon’s Web Services. The Defense Intelligence Agency and NGA are partnering to be the IC’s desktop environment service provider and have brought tens of thousands of users on board over the last few years.

Beyond ICITE, Sherman is charged with overseeing IT acquisition and research and development efforts across the IC, acting as the milestone decision authority.

Sherman holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Texas A&M University and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Houston.