Government Eagle Award: David Shive

As the longest-tenured CIO in the federal government, David Shive has a knack for being in the room when innovation is happening. 

In addition to leading tech at the General Services Administration, Shive is vice chair of the federal CIO Council and a member of the board of the Technology Modernization Fund, an office established by Congress to make strategic investments in agency tech upgrades.

Part of the reason why Shive is closing in on a 10-year chip as GSA CIO is the agency itself. Its position as the leading supplier of technology to federal agencies is “one of the things I love about GSA,” he said in an interview. He calls his post “a techie’s dream job.”

“One of the things that excited me about coming to GSA and has kept me around is the fact that we don’t do to our partners what we haven’t tried out on ourselves first,” Shive said. “What that means is a lot of our outward-facing products and services got their start on the inside, where we would have an idea and try it at scale within the agency first.” 

Shive ticked off a long series of firsts at GSA, some predating his arrival. It was the first agency to have an internet connection on every desktop, the first to have an open-source software strategy, the first to hire a chief customer officer and the first to do agile implementation.

“And these firsts are because of a tendency to lean forward. But we don’t do it just because it’s cool,” he said. “We do it because we use ourselves as a proving ground to then scale some of that great thinking out through our products and services that we project out to the agencies and the citizens who are end users of these services.” 

Shive has also seen the roles of government and private-sector CIOs morph over the years from serving as a “chief tech bean counter” managing a portfolio of technology investments to a true business advisor to the front office. And, Shive notes, it’s increasingly common to find tech experience on the resumes of top leaders.

“I suspect that in government, you may not see former CIOs coming in and running federal agencies, but what you’ll see are CEO types who have meaningful experience in tech domains, as a 21st-century executive should, and being able to employ those technology strategies to better support the business mission.”

Shive has also seen the pace of change accelerate dramatically inside of government, especially recently with hard pivots on cybersecurity, customer experience, digital identity, cloud adoption and more. 

“When I talk with my private-sector CIO peers, they are shocked at how fast we move here in government. There’s been a long-standing misnomer that government operates at a very plodding pace, that we’re behind the private sector,” Shive said. “And you know what? That’s just not true. Having worked in both, I know that the quality of the technology outcomes supporting the businesses of the agencies that we serve is equal to or better than the best of the best out in the private sector.”