Air Force names new CIO

Venice Goodwine replaces Lauren Knausenberger, who departed in June, as the Air Force chief information officer.

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

August 15, 2023 8:43 am

2 min read

Venice Goodwine is the new chief information officer of the Air Force.

Goodwine, who has been the director of enterprise IT for the service since June 2021, takes over for Lauren Knausenberger, who departed in June.

An Air Force spokesperson confirmed Goodwine started in her new role on Aug. 13.

In taking over as the new CIO, Goodwine inherits a lot of priorities and programs she’s quite familiar with. As director of enterprise IT, one of her big focus areas was the roll out of the enterprise IT-as-a-service (EITaaS) effort. The Air Force won the protest of the award to CACI in April and has begun implementation.

In the first wave, the focus will be on devices and manpower. The vendors will be responsible for IT service management, end user devices, and various support services, including operating a centralized helpdesk for the Air Force and Space Force.

The Air Force is planning two more waves under EITaaS to run base-area networks and wide-area networks.

Another major focus area is the move to zero trust. The Air Force set a goal to implement the technologies that make up this approach by 2027.

Of course, both EITaaS and zero trust fall under the Air Force’s digital transformation initiative, which has been an ongoing journey for the past few years. Before she left, Knausenberger said she reduced spending on extra licenses or unnecessary tools as well as consolidating enterprise licenses to help pay for new and improved technologies.

In all, Goodwine now oversees a $17 billion portfolio and leads 10,000 civilian cyber and IT personnel and another 20,000 cyber operations and support personnel around the world. The Air Force requested for IT and cybersecurity in the fiscal 2024 budget roughly $10.2 billion.

As CIO she manages three directorates in the Air Force: Enterprise IT, data and artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Goodwine has spent most of her career working for the Defense Department, enlisting in the Air Force in 1986 where she worked on signals intelligence. She transitioned to the Air Force Reserves in 2003 and retired in 2022. Additionally, she worked with the Marines Corps for six years and then her first stint as a civilian with the Air Force was as a senior cybersecurity officer.

She left the military sector for more than two-and-a-half years to be the chief information security officer at the Agriculture Department. She returned in 2021 to be the director of enterprise IT.

Goodwine received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a master’s in technology from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Master of Business Administration from the William Carey University.