Federal Manager's Daily Report

The Justice Department is touting a new Distinguished IT Fellows program as a strategy for addressing an issue common to federal agencies, recruiting and retaining top-quality employees in cybersecurity and other IT fields.

The department is using the program to “bring industry experts to the department on term appointments to help solve our most challenging and high-visibility issues,” according to a post by Justice CIO Joseph Klimavicz on the CIO Council site.

“Their combination of technical expertise and fresh perspective on federal government business processes offers a unique and innovative approach to our challenges. The goal of the program and its associated initiatives is two-fold. It aims to re-think, re-engineer, and optimize existing technology solutions and to implement new technologies based on proven IT delivery models from the private and non-profit sectors,” he wrote.

“DoJ’s IT fellows have already made significant contributions – including exploring improvements to re-entry technologies and processes, improving tribal access to federal law enforcement information, developing a Department-wide employee notification system, and re-engineering a consolidated national FOIA portal for federal agencies,” he added.

He also pointed to use of the Pathways recent college graduates program and the Scholarship for Service CyberCorps program as valuable in “feeding the IT workforce pipeline, as employees move on to more senior positions or retire.”