Dr. Raj Iyer, chief information officer for the U.S. Army, said the service branch has made significant strides in the Army’s first digital transformation strategy over the past year in the face of drastic changes in the geopolitical environment.
In a Profiles in Excellence CIO Achievements interview with the Federal News Network, Dr. Iyer identified the establishment of accredited cloud environments, network modernization and the deployment of remote collaborative environments among the Army’s key achievements in 2021.
Regarding the Army’s cloud transition efforts, Dr. Iyer said the initiative was “critical because it was not just about moving apps to the cloud, but for us in the Army, it was about us leveraging the cloud as a war fighting platform.”
Citing the cloud as the Army’s next-generation solution for exchanging operational and mission data across tactical and enterprise networks, Dr. Iyer said, “We established those accredited environments, and we actually were successful in migrating over 300 systems to the cloud just in one year, and that included three of our most complex SAP ERP systems.”
Dr. Iyer was named the Army’s first civilian CIO in Nov. 2020, following his post at Deloitte Consulting as managing director of government and public services. He noted that because he assumed the newly created CIO role during a complex era of significant global shifts, he had to prioritize the Army’s emerging issues as well as long-term ones.
“It was really important to kind of balance the near-term priorities and ongoing operations with the reason why the office was stood up in the first place, which was for us to be forward-leaning and for us to keep up with the changing pace of technology,” Dr. Iyer commented.
