CIO — On the five-minute morning walk from his Washington, D.C., apartment to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover building, Darwin A. John, the bureau’s new CIO, thought about his upcoming interview with this reporter and made himself a promise: "I’m just going to talk specifics." Infrastructure upgrades. A virtual case management system with multimedia capabilities. A data warehousing project with advanced search functions that would help the FBI "know what it knows," and thereby prevent intelligence failures like the ones that led to 9/11.
But despite his best intentions, that’s not what happens. By 9:30 a.m., John, a slightly rumpled, deeply jowled elder of the CIO profession, is talking about how the FBI needs to think "holistically," how law enforcement agencies and the Department of Homeland Security can work together to find "simplicity on the other side of complexity," and how having a philosophical bent could work to his advantage at an agency that worships action, not thought.
Got all that?
"I’m talking about three things at once, which I always do, because that’s the way I think," says John, 64, who’s tall (5 feet 11 inches) without seeming so (he hunches) and speaks authoritatively in a quiet voice. He has clear blue eyes that he veils and unveils by taking off and putting on his eyeglasses throughout the day. "For me," he says, explaining how he thinks about his plans to remake the FBI’s IT, "there’s a canvas, and we’re painting a picture, and we’ll draw a little tree here or rock there. I don’t start at the top and work to the bottom. That drives some people crazy."
What remains to be seen is whether it will drive Washington crazy enough to prevent John from completing his picture. The FBI is not known for valuing introspection, yet on July 8, after an extensive national search, it chose this compulsively thoughtful and unassuming man, and charged him with transforming this almost mythical agency from a Keystone cop shop into an IT-powered hive of supersleuths. As one of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s most prominent appointments after 9/11, John, former CIO of the Mormon Church and Scott Paper, has put his neck on the line in a way few federal government CIOs ever have.
He didn’t do it for the money. The position was advertised at between $125,972 and $138,200 a year for a person who, as the recruiter who led the search puts it, "could be pulling down his $500K." John and his wife of 45 years, both lifelong Mormons, left their home state of Utah last July so that John could move into a bare office in the seventh-floor executive corridor known to FBI insiders as Mahogany Row.
