When Dave Wennergren became chairman of the Defense Department’s Identity Management Senior Coordinating Group two years ago, it was yet another opportunity for the Navy CIO to oversee a fundamental change in the way government does business.

It’s the job of the Identity Management group to manage and coordinate smart-card, public-key infrastructure and biometric initiatives across the entire Defense Department.

Viewed through the prism of the identity management initiatives, the department is a single enterprise. For an organization as big and byzantine as the Defense Department, that kind of perspective is nothing short of world-shattering.

“If we did it the old way, the Defense Department would end up with 60 different cards and 50 different PKI solutions, and we’d never be able to work together,” Wennergren said. Applying an enterprisewide approach, the department is moving to “having a common smart card used by 3.5 million to 4 million people.”

“Actually watching that turn from an idea to a reality over the last several years has been a wonderful change-management experience,” he said.

For Wennergren, the issues generated by cultural change dominate the work of most CIOs today.

“I know it’s the buzzword of the day but it truly is at the heart of all the work we do,” he said. “While you have to have a good understanding of technology to function as a CIO, I really do spend most of my time working on cultural-change issues for the organization.”

Most of those issues relate to repercussions from the emergence of the Internet and the information age, he said.

“We’ve lived in organizational structures for decades that have been focused on being very decentralized,” he said. “When the Internet emerged, all of a sudden opportunities came about that would allow us to share knowledge around the world simultaneously. This model of local places building solutions to meet local needs was no longer effective.

“So getting people to think differently, to give up some personal control for the sake of being part of an enterprisewide solution that allows you to do business better for the broader enterprise, is a powerful thing. But it really does require people to step out of the comfort zone that they’ve gotten used to.”

The human capital element is a major part of the cultural-change test facing government executives, Wennergren said.

Leaders have to focus on helping their colleagues understand the need for change and unlocking “the potential in their teammates to find the best path to the future. We must each be a positive force for change, setting examples that others will follow and creating an environment that fosters innovation and creativity while ensuring that our people are supported, encouraged and challenged.” CIOs tend to be at the very center of the far-reaching changes rumbling through government.

“As IT began to be woven through the fabric of every process and every mission area of an agency, you began to see that every challenge we faced crossed traditional organizational and functional boundaries, so suddenly you had a bunch of change stuff that has to happen,” he said.

Wennergren, a 26-year veteran of the Navy Department who has never worked anywhere else, is no stranger to the art of managing change.

“Change-management work has been the galvanizing theme of my career,” Wennergren said.

Wennergren’s experiences in managing change haven’t been only in the IT arena. In the 1990s, he was a key member of the Navy’s Base Realignment and Closure team, conducting economic, infrastructure and community impact analysis of planned base closures.

“That’s hugely important work that has a profound impact on people’s lives,” he said. “I learned a lot about [the Navy] organization and about change.”

He also has overseen the sometimes thorny deployment of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet project, which involves the consolidation of hundreds of local, incongruent networks into a single, enterprise network—which represents another massive cultural change in the department.

Managing such change is an exacting undertaking, requiring careful calibration of the impact of change on people and processes.

“It’s crucially important that you don’t want to get to the point in the change management process where things fall apart because you didn’t follow through and make sure that people have realistic expectations, and that you are managing the perturbations through the system that occur whenever you undertake a change project,” he said.

Focusing on large change-management efforts has helped Wennergren “forge skills about getting disparate groups to find a path to success on contentious issues.”

“I love the opportunity to help think differently about something and help try to move a team forward,” he said. “For me, the common theme has been the importance of a positive attitude. I know that’s sort of a cliché, but that was the thing that I learned early on in my career.”

In the government-executive community, Wennergren’s extraordinarily positive disposition bolsters his reputation as a strong and visionary leader.

“Dave Wennergren’s style is a great example of optimistic, visionary leadership,” said Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator for electronic government and IT. “Dave believes that great things not only can be developed but actually achieved, and he leads his staff and the CIO Council in this manner.”

She added that people in government are drawn to the type of “leadership that Dave exemplifies, and with that, he and his teams achieve great things.”

Wennergren’s path to high achievement in the Navy Department began in 1980, when he joined the department as a civilian employee right out of Mansfield State University in Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in communications and public relations.

“I applied for a job as a management analyst at the Naval Air Systems Command Field Activity in Philadelphia and got it,” he said.

At first, it was just a job, nothing more, nothing less. But that attitude didn’t last long. Wennergren was soon drawn into the Navy’s culture of shared purpose, camaraderie and service.

“I feel like I’m a part of something big and important,” he said. “The Navy has done a great job over the years of creating that kind of culture of camaraderie and shared purpose. That gives you a lot of motivation. Clearly, there’s this feeling of service to the nation that you become a part of. I’ve never regretted a day of it and never thought about working anyplace else.” As Wennergren’s responsibilities grew, so did his exposure to the management of change.

As head of the plans and policy branch of the Shore Installation Management Division of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Wennergren was involved in restructuring, consolidation and partnership efforts—“helping Navy [shore] installations realize they can band together for the common good and work together,” he said.

Wennergren was named CIO in 2002 after serving four years as the Navy’s deputy CIO for enterprise integration and security, a position he assumed in 1998. No stranger to major collaboration efforts, Wennergren’s experience with the Navy over the years is perfectly suited to his duties as vice chairman of the federal CIO Council, a position he took over earlier this year.

He knows how crucial it is for the CIO Council and the other three federal chief executive councils—the Chief Financial Officers Council, the Chief Acquisition Officers Council and the Chief Human Capital Officers Council—to work closely together to meet the common, cross-agency goals of improving government performance and enhancing overall results.

Collaboration efforts. “All of the major issues [facing government] cross organizational and functional boundaries, so the fact that we have these councils is really important,” he said. “Most of the challenges we face don’t just live in the financial space, because the financial space may require contracting, and it clearly involves IT and [human capital].”

Wennergren said he is passionate about the work of the CIO Council and the collaborative work it does with the other three councils.

“As the new vice chair of the CIO Council, I want to continue that work and make sure that we’re all sharing best practices and lessons learned,” he said. “Getting those groups to [continue to] work together is clearly one of my priorities.”

Are there ways to improve the quality of collaboration efforts among the councils? “I’d like to think we’re doing a good job of working together,” he said. “That’s been my sense.”

He observed that the four councils dispatch liaisons to sit in on each other’s meetings to stay on top of the issues, and that the General Services Administration—which serves as a principal coordinator for the CXO councils—has provided critical support in making sure information is shared across the councils. Not that Wennergren is satisfied with the status quo. “I’ll continue to keep an eye on it,” he said. “We’d like to keep raising the bar for each other about what more we can do.”

Wennergren also plans to raise the bar for the CIO Council. One goal is to create a new strategic plan for the council. “I think the right kind of vision and an execution strategy that goes along with it is crucial to align the efforts of the CIOs,” he said.

Intrinsic to a new plan is an emphasis on information sharing, he said.

“Clearly there’s a lot of work around this idea of truly achieving what we call in DOD a network-centric world, but in the broader sense, it’s this idea of reach back,” he said. “Whether it’s service to the citizen or [providing for] national defense, this Web-based world provides us the opportunity to share knowledge across boundaries, and that’s really important. We live in a world where you have coalition partners, allies and people in industry and academia that you have to be able to collaborate with.”

In Wennergren’s networked world, the engagement of senior leadership—early and often—is crucial.

“It’s important that senior leaders be viewed as positive change agents so that we can lose that ‘What’s in it for me?’ kind of stuff and really seek out ways to do things better and serve the broader audience,” he said.

In the last analysis, for Wennergren, strong leadership is rooted in having the right attitude.

“If you have the right attitude, you can make a difference,” he said.