Pete Tseronis
Former CTO, Director of Network Services, US Department of Energy (DOE)
A highly respected and recognized strategic Energy Cyber Executive, Peter “Pete” Tseronis has served over twenty-five years in myriad progressive technology and leadership responsibility roles spanning four Administrations and three cabinet-level agencies. An accomplished thought leader with strong people and substantive technical skills sought after by mission stakeholders and executive management, Pete maintains a unique capability to keep pace with evolving technology advancements, demands, applications, risks, and threats.
Recently transitioned from the Federal Government, Pete is the Founder and CEO of Dots and Bridges LLC, whose mission is to discover, cultivate, and enhance relationships that catalyze business opportunities and enrich value. While collaborating with government, industry, laboratory, and academic ecosystems to unearth transformative innovation and enable today’s emerging technologies become tomorrow’s growth sectors, Pete’s fervor to triage the cybersecurity, analytics, and critical infrastructure domains in order to promote data driven insight and value creation remains his passion.
Appointed the Department of Energy’s first-ever Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Pete is deeply aware and appreciative of the skill sets and capabilities resident across the entire federal enterprise. Throughout his professional career, Pete has been sought out for ability to help others understand and balance existing and new priorities while facilitating mission alignment with technology investments. A stategic pathfinder and diligent initiator of short- and long-term opportunities for the public sector, Pete operates on a continuum of technical and mission enhancing activities, building strong partnernerships, and leveraging information to promote data-driven insight and actionable policies. As an innovation advocator for the technology transfer and commercialization of intellectual property, Pete is an effective and credible collaborator across the national laboratory, government, industry, and academic eco-systems. Pete’s fervor for the research and development community resulted in the creation of an advocacy and technology exchange forum to streamline information sharing across public and private sectors.
Building on this success, Pete led the development and creation of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Information Technology Roadmap, promoting a formal, sustainable innovation program that connects the DoE’s federated service providers in a common effort to enable mission objectives, guides IT investments and fiscal forecasting, promotes interoperability, and advances the enterprise cyber portfolio. Bridging the innovation, analytics, and cybersecurity domains to promote the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure, Pete developed and grew the enterprise-wide approach to identity, credential, and access management. Establishing a cyber architecture as the foundation for trust and interoperability, Pete created an identity mangement framework to identify, authenticate, and authorize individuals (and machines) both within the Federal Government and with external organizations. This structure serves as a foundation to strengthening the protection of classified and sensitive information, helping to build confidence and trust so that such information can be shared with authorized users, and mitigating the consequences of infrastructure disruptions across all 16 critical infrastructure sectors at national, regional, and local levels. Understanding the technology landscape of the Federal Government’s stakeholders and mission enabled Pete to serve in key leadership roles, including Federal IPv6 Task Force chair, the Energy.Data.Gov co-chair, and the Cloud First Task Force chair – all of which afford broad exposure to the distinct operating environments and key Administration prioritites. Pete’s demonstrated ability to clearly and concisely present ideas/opportunities, drive consensus/agreement with decisions, and direct the technology, acquisition, and marketing, segments have resulted in FAR amendments (IPv6), OMB mandates (FedRAMP), and Challenges (Apps for Energy). These experiences have refined Pete’s aptitude to successfully recruit and lead diverse experienced individuals and develop new and emerging talent by identifying raw potential and applying the appropriate degree of shaping and assistance.
Pete is an advocate for technological innovation and possesses the highest degree of effective communications and candor. Through his activism on intra- and inter-agency task forces, e.g. STAR METRICS, Geospatial Science Steering Committee, and Digital Government Strategy, Pete has been successful in promoting the use of best-in-class technologies and leveraging capabilities across boundaries; all of which have resulted in challenging the status quo and willingness of others to experiment with new approaches. Selling new ideas and anticipating customer needs resulted in a mission-enhancing Enterprise Search deployment at the DoE and a state-of-the-art Unified Communications implementation at the ED.
Prior to joining the Department, Pete served as the CTO and Director of Network Services for the U.S. Department of Education (ED). During his tenure as the CTO for the ED, Pete was responsible for a multi-million dollar budget to transform divergent voice, video, and data communications into an enterprise-wide collaboration platform. A self-proclaimed “Connective Tissue Officer,” Pete’s passion for connecting dots, building bridges, and fostering relationships contributes to assisting others understand and balance existing and new priorities while conveying technology’s value to the mission. This collaborative approach attempts to manage risk through collaboration and presents an environment where issues are shared outside their specific community of interest (e.g., security issues are shared with acquisition subject matter experts), allowing for multiple equities to be addressed, while addressing the underlying issues.
Pete received his B.A. in Communications from Villanova University and earned his M.S. in Information and Telecommunication Systems from Johns Hopkins University.
