Mark Schwartz is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where he leads an IT organization that provides services to 20,000 employees who process 7 million benefit applications a year. His primary goal is to increase the IT organization’s responsiveness to mission needs by reducing time from concept to deployment for new capabilities. To support this goal, Mr. Schwartz has introduced agile and lean development practices, continuous delivery, and DevOps to an organization that must work within the constraints of federal government policies. He has been a leader in introducing agile approaches to the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies.

Prior to USCIS, Mr. Schwartz was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange, where his innovative Family Room application drove dramatic market share, revenue, and profit growth. This accomplishment was recognized by CIO Magazine with a CIO 100 award in 2006. Mr. Schwartz has also served as the CEO of Auctiva Corporation, a software company that provides software and services to buyers and sellers in online auction sites. In 2010 Mr. Schwartz was named one of the Premier 100 IT Leaders by Computerworld Magazine, and in 2013 Mr. Schwartz received a Federal 100 award from Federal Computer Week.

Mr. Schwartz holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Yale University, an M.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, and an M.B.A. from Wharton.

 

Presentations by Mark Schwartz:

  • אירוע DevOps 2015, שני, 9 בפברואר 2015, 08:40

    The US Federal Government spends more than $80 billion each year on information technology. As the fiasco with healthcare.gov demonstrates, the results are not always good. Government IT programs are expensive and monolithic, and the lead time from a “mission need” to a deployed capability is often measured in years (in one of our agency’s programs, about 12 years!). IT systems are often difficult to use, and the US government’s online service offerings to citizens are far from meeting the expectations of a public that is used to Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

    The US government has only recently begun to adopt agile approaches, and only in a few agencies. But the results have been encouraging, and show that it is possible for the bureaucracy to be agile. DevOps, however is a game changer. At USCIS we have moved to a continuous integration, continuous delivery approach, and have begun experimenting with a DevOps model tailored to the needs of the government.

    By combining DevOps with some ideas taken from the Lean Startup movement, I believe we can cause a radical change in how the government does IT. We can dramatically reduce lead times and costs, improve the usability of systems, provide more transparency, create citizen-centric online services, and – importantly – significantly improve the government’s security posture.

דוברים נוספים באירוע DevOps 2015

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