Jane Rathbun’s Disruptive Technology Leadership as Navy CIO Earns 2024 Wash100 Award

Executive Mosaic is pleased to confer the Wash100 honor upon Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun in recognition of her shrewd, conscientious technology leadership of the service branch.

There is a Wash100 Award popular vote contest until April 30. Vote for your favorite recipients today and help determine who is the most beloved GovCon figure!

The Wash100 Award is EM’s annual commendation of the most influential senior executives, military leaders and government officials shaping the government contracting industry. 100 winners are carefully selected from thousands of candidates, evaluated based on their innovation, vision and reliability to deliver results in the sector to support the American mission.

“In her capacity as the Department of the Navy’s new CIO, Jane drives innovation within the service’s $12 billion IT portfolio and spearheads modernization efforts across the entire DON information environment,” commented Jim Garrettson, CEO of Executive Mosaic.

“In her time in the role thus far, Jane has earned a reputation for championing zero trust, enabling cyber readiness, improving the warfighter experience and harnessing the power of commercial technology. Jane is an innovator and a disruptor who we’re proud to include in our Wash100 list this year,” added Garrettson, creator of the Wash100 Award.

Rathbun enjoyed a busy last year of ascendance, appointed as principal deputy CIO in January 2023, acting CIO in March and confirmed as full-time CIO of the department in November.

“Jane’s leadership, technical acumen, and personal character stood out amongst a very competitive field of candidates and represent the best of our ongoing efforts to build a culture of warfighting among our one Navy-Marine Corps team,” said Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, a fellow Wash100 winner.

Previously, she also led Navy tech efforts as its chief technology officer and held roles like acting division chief for the Strategic Capabilities and Analysis Division in U.S. Africa Command and chief of staff of institutional reform and governance for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She is a three-decade Department of Defense devotee.

2024 marks Rathbun’s first Wash100 Award, following in the footsteps of her predecessor, former Navy CIO and multiple Wash100 Award winner Aaron Weis.

During his tenure, Weis was bullish on a strategy centering on taking a “cyber ready” stance. Rathbun has since adopted this mantle, which means holding program executive offices to a “basic set of controls,” requiring that they “have continuous monitoring and an adversarial threat assessment capability [and] that their people are current with cyber training,” she told an audience at Potomac Officers Club’s CIO Summit last year.

Don’t miss out on POC’s 2024 CIO Summit, coming up on April 17. This event will gather all of the most prominent CIOs from across the government and private sector to foster dialogues about how tech leaders from industry can help agency leaders achieve their missions. Register here now! It will be held at Hilton Alexandria Mark Center in Virginia.

Rathbun is working tirelessly to make the DON a “a modern, data-centric and data-aware organization capable of consuming and exploiting data in near-real-time in support of the warfighter at the speed of mission…information is combat power.”

She is accomplishing this through cloud-focused efforts like the new ship-mounted cloud computing infrastructure the Navy is considering to make ships more connected in contested, remote environments. Concurrent with that announcement in October, Rathbun’s team stood up the Neptune Cloud Management Office to enable the Navy and Marine Corps’ efficient acquisition of cloud capabilities.

In November, Rathbun helped introduce the Navy’s new cyber strategy, a seven-pillar collaboration with the Office of the Principal Cyber Advisor. Among the strategy’s tenets are supporting the cyber workforce, securing defense-critical infrastructure and weapon systems and conducting and defending enterprise IT, data and networks, and the strategy was culled from years of global cyber domain activities. It’s slated to offer critical guidance for the Navy’s cyber modernization going forward.

Congratulations to Jane Rathbun and the whole team at the Navy’s Office of the Chief Information Officer on their Wash100 Award. We are excited to see what the rest of 2024 holds for your forward-thinking work!

Hear distinguished CIOs speak at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 CIO Summit on April 17. Register here now!