Federal chief information officers (CIOs) have always been responsible for keeping technology running, but Department of Energy (DOE) CIO Dawn Zimmer sees a much tighter connection today between the speed of IT and the speed of the mission.
“The pace of technology and the demand for it is now directly correlated to how fast the mission can move,” Zimmer told MeriTalk in a recent interview. “Our ability to adopt and use technology efficiently is increasingly tied to operational readiness across energy, science, and national security.”
Zimmer, who served as Acting CIO before her permanent appointment in November 2025, says her focus is proving that each technology investment helps employees work faster, removes barriers, or gives mission teams capabilities they can actually use.
“You don’t have the dollars to explore everything,” Zimmer said. “You have to really look for technologies that can prove their value.”
Building the foundation for mission speed
Asked to rank DOE’s fiscal year 2027 (FY27) technology priorities, Zimmer declined.
Not because the priorities were unimportant, but because she sees artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, data, cybersecurity, infrastructure, modernization, and workforce capabilities as too interconnected to separate cleanly anymore.
“The real trick of the job right now is keeping them all humming in unison with each other,” she said. “You don’t have the flexibility these days to say, ‘We’ll invest in cyber one year and workforce tools another year.’”
For DOE, that means strengthening an enterprise foundation that lets mission teams move quickly without repeatedly rebuilding the same capabilities. Zimmer pointed to secure, scalable platforms and reducing duplicative systems as key pieces of that approach.
Zimmer also highlighted the high expectations DOE’s scientific and engineering workforce brings to modern technology.
“I’ve got users who are home playing with chatbots and writing code on their own,” she said. “How do you stay in front of them so that their experience in the office is the same as their experience at home?”
Putting mission teams in the driver’s seat
Across the organization, Zimmer sees an important change underway: AI is increasingly being pulled into the enterprise by mission teams rather than pushed out by the CIO organization.
She pointed to DOE’s internal AI and data capabilities, including its Databricks-based enterprise data environment, as platforms that program offices can increasingly use to attack real problems.
That changes what success looks like for fiscal year 2027.
Zimmer said she is less interested in measuring how many people touch an AI platform than whether teams are solving problems faster. Her priority is to give mission organizations enough data, models, training, coaching, and engineering support that they can increasingly build solutions themselves.
DOE’s broader mission is moving in the same direction. The department’s Genesis Mission is designed to connect AI, advanced computing, and large-scale scientific data to accelerate work across energy, science, and national security.
For Zimmer, the long-term opportunity looks highly personalized.
“My vision is a data integration environment that looks like your widget page on your phone,” she said. Rather than receiving a standard corporate dashboard, employees could choose which underlying data sources matter to their role and bring them together into an individualized view.
“I get to pick and choose which ones I want to talk to each other on my homepage depending on what my role is,” Zimmer said. “That’s where the real power is coming.”
Why automate a broken process?
Zimmer sees scaling the technology as only part of the job; she also wants agencies to scrutinize the processes surrounding it.
She recalled a recent workflow DOE examined in which roughly 15 people still had to touch or approve a process, despite the technology already surrounding it. The obvious question, she said, was: Why?
Could AI perform part of the initial review, flag the areas that genuinely require attention, and send those issues directly to the right people instead of routing the entire package through every traditional handoff?
That kind of redesign is where Zimmer sees some of AI’s most practical near-term value.
She is particularly focused on use cases that save employees time or improve decision-making. In some cases, she said, teams are looking at work that previously took dozens of hours and asking how better data integration and AI could compress that effort dramatically.
But Zimmer cautioned against automating away the expertise that makes government processes accountable in the first place. For her, process redesign still has to preserve human judgment where it matters.
“You have to keep the human in the loop,” Zimmer said. “The threat is that we rely too heavily on the AI and don’t double-check the work. Because guess what? It can be wrong.”
Career employees, Zimmer said, know where the hidden risks and institutional “gotchas” live. The challenge is figuring out which controls are essential and which have simply accumulated over time.
Getting to yes – securely
Zimmer applies much the same philosophy to cybersecurity.
While DOE continues to advance zero trust, identity management, and protections against an increasingly complex threat landscape, the department is also preparing for post-quantum risk – which Zimmer called a major priority.
But cybersecurity cannot become an automatic brake on mission activity.
“One of the things I encourage my team [to ask] all the time is: how do we get to yes – quickly?” Zimmer said.
Historically, she added, cybersecurity organizations could often default to “no.” That approach is harder to sustain as technology changes faster and agencies confront tradeoffs that cannot be eliminated entirely through controls.
The job increasingly requires CIOs, chief information security officers, and mission leaders to decide what risk they are willing to accept – then use technology to spot vulnerabilities early enough to keep that risk manageable.
Faster technology needs faster rules
Zimmer says the next major opportunity to accelerate federal technology lies in reducing friction across acquisition, authorization, and compliance.
She said recent federal efforts are moving in the right direction, including FedRAMP 20x, which is intended to create a more flexible, automation-oriented approach to cloud security certification.
But technology still changes much faster than government can acquire and authorize it.
That becomes particularly visible when small or emerging companies arrive with useful capabilities but have not yet cleared federal authorization requirements.
“Policy needs to focus more, in my mind, on the outcomes and less on the risk,” Zimmer said. “We need more flexibility to adopt secure capabilities and still meet the federal requirement, but not have them so rigid.”
She expects CIOs to continue pushing for less friction over the next several years.
Meeting the moment
Zimmer also wants to challenge an enduring outside perception of government technology.
“People outside of the federal government still believe there’s some antiquity to our technology,” she said. “The reality is we are moving at lightning speed, and we are bringing more value to the American taxpayer than ever before.”
She pointed to DOE processes such as notices of funding opportunities, where better workflows and AI offer the potential to shorten the time required to move funding opportunities to the public.
That, to Zimmer, is the more meaningful measure of modernization: not simply whether an agency deployed a new platform, but whether technology materially reduces the time between a mission need and a mission result.
And despite the speed, complexity, and pressure surrounding the job, Zimmer’s assessment of the moment is decidedly optimistic.
“This is a fascinating time to be a CIO in the federal government,” she said. “I have the best job.”
More from MeriTalk’s Federal CXO Spotlight series:
- Basia Sall, Chief Data Officer, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
- Adam Starr, Chief Information Officer, Office of Personnel Management
- Mangala Kuppa, Chief Information Officer, Department of Labor