Johnson Joy, CIO of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that he came to the Federal government hoping to use his private sector expertise to disrupt the public sector.
“I’m a disruptor so I want to bring what the private sector has to offer to the government,” Joy said at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Roadmap: Tomorrow’s Data Center in a Cloud-Driven Digital World event, produced by MeriTalk, on Oct. 24.
He previously served as CEO of J3 Global, a program manager for Independence Blue Cross, and a project manager for Cigna.
Joy compared when he first started at HUD to the job of a doctor. Joy said that doctors can’t prescribe medication until they examine the patient. Joy said he’s been researching the problems with HUD’s systems before he starts to tackle the problems. Joy said that the solution is to move legacy systems to the cloud.
“Our commitment is to use the cloud to host world-class enterprise systems,” Joy said.
Joy said that his goals for HUD are to hire and retain a talented IT workforce, modernize the IT infrastructure, and allow innovation.
“We need to be agile,” Joy said. “We need to move around. We cannot depend on one or two places to place our data. It has to be in the cloud.”
Joy said that he appreciates the advice from the White House’s American Technology Council to reduce agency barriers to innovation. One aspect of innovation that Joy said he hopes to take advantage of is using artificial intelligence to automate processes in the cloud.
“That’s going to be key–thinking out of the box, and if you don’t do that you’ll be stuck in the status quo and nothing is going to happen,” Joy said.
