Speakers

Glenn Jones serves as the Activity Command Information Officer (ACIO) and Information Technology Division Director at the Department of Navy, Naval Sea Systems Command Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) located in Dahlgren, Virginia. Jones has over 30 years of federal government service and has served as IT Manager at nine different federal agencies within the Departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. This vast wealth of experience involved serving as IT Program Manager within the Department of Agriculture, managing delivery of IT services in disaster situations while working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and as IT Customer Solutions Manager within the ultra-secure, highly critical “no-fail” mission of the United States Secret Service. As the current NSWCDD IT Director/ACIO, Jones delivers strategic vision, leadership, management and oversite of the entire NSWCDD IT ecosystem comprising highly complex research and development networks designed to deliver next-generation technology to the warfighter. Jones is committed to delivering cutting edge IT solutions designed to revolutionize the end-user IT experience.

Brian Merrick joined the Department of State in 2008 working for the Bureau of Information Resource Management as the Deputy Manager for the IT Cost Center Working Capital Fund. During his career he has held leadership positions as Deputy Executive Director for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and as Director of the Office of Digital in the Bureau of International Information Programs. Additionally, he was Senior Advisor to the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Foreign Operations in the Bureau of Information Resource Management supporting global IT infrastructure operations and subsequently moved on to become the Director of the Office of Innovative Infrastructure providing wireless and cloud-based products and services across the Department. Brian is currently the Director of the Cloud Program Management Office, working to modernize IT across the enterprise. 

Prior to joining the State Department, Brian was commissioned officer in the US Army in 1996 and in 2005, he left the Army to work with PricewaterhouseCoopers as a financial management consultant and an IT project manager. 

Brian holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Wright State University and a Master of Science in Leadership from Olin Business School, Washington University. In addition, he holds certifications as a Project Management Professional, Certified Information Systems Auditor, Certified Information Security Manager, Federal IT Security Institute Manager, Certified Defense Financial Manager and Certified Government Financial Manager.

Bill Vass is Vice President of Engineering at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Bill oversees more than 42 cloud and edge technologies that allow AWS’ customers to store, analyze, manage, and retrieve information quickly and efficiently. Bill’s teams deploy, manage, and monitor the cloud. They provide large scale storage; support gaming, large scale simulations, and studio rendering; provide data transfer and real time streaming services; lead AWS’ product development into the Internet of Things (IoT); create robotics and autonomous systems; support the Snowball Edge processing device systems; and lead AWS’ research and development into quantum computing. In short, his teams develop and operate the largest software defined storage, streaming, IoT, automated management, and monitoring systems in the world, used by web-based companies, consumer companies, enterprises, and governments.

Before joining AWS, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Liquid Robotics, Inc., a pioneering Data as a Service, cloud-based solutions company that designs and builds autonomous robots that serve a wide range of customers in the energy, shipping, defense, communications, scientific, intelligence, and environmental markets.

Prior to that, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, an independent subsidiary of Sun Microsystems with its own board of directors, where he was responsible for growing over $1.4B of revenue. His responsibilities spanned Product Development, Sales and Business Development, Marketing, Partner Management, and Service Delivery.

Before his role leading Sun Microsystems Federal, Mr. Vass served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Sun, where he defined and delivered the technology vision and architecture while he managed global deployments in support of Sun’s 50K business users. During his time as CIO, Mr. Vass significantly improved security, availability, and application delivery while reducing the overall operations cost of IT from $880M to $360M.

Mr. Vass had a lengthy public service career. Working for the Secretary of Defense in the Office of the CIO, he was on a team responsible the for oversight of a $35.5B budget, as well as system and software acquisition, research, development, and integration standards for over 6,800 IT systems. His organization managed networks, servers and applications across the Pentagon’s defense networks.

Prior to joining the Office of the CIO, Mr. Vass was CTO and technical lead for the U.S. Army’s personnel systems worldwide. Before his work at the DoD, Mr. Vass developed large-scale commercial Information Technology engineering and business systems solutions for defense system integrators, as well as the oil and gas and ocean engineering industries.

George Jackson is director of events at GovExec – the largest and most-influential media
company in the public sector marketplace. He joined the company in 2020 to enhance the scale
of their events and audience experiences. In 2021, George launched GovExec TV (streaming
video content) and received the company’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Award, part of their first-
annual Icon Awards.

George graduated from The Ohio State University in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in English.
In 2006, he earned his master’s in broadcast journalism from the University of Maryland,
College Park.

George spent the first five years of his journalism career at WJHL-TV in Johnson City Tenn. –
beginning as an overnight producer for the station’s 6 a.m. broadcast. He advanced to lead on-air
reporter for WJHL’s 11 p.m. newscast.

As a reporter, George examined the earnings of two non-profit hospital systems, felony charges
filed against a local sheriff, predatory paving companies, a health benefits backlog for local
veterans, and a series of cold-case murder investigations. He received an honorable mention for
Best TV Reporter in the 2011 Tennessee AP Broadcast awards and won a Best Investigative
Reporting award from Media General in 2010.

George joined DC’s ABC affiliate WJLA-TV in 2012 to produce Capital Insider, which won
him an Emmy award. One year later, he developed and recorded the pilot episode of Government Matters – a program about the business of government. It debuted as a weekly show on Sunday, August 4 th of 2013. George led Government Matters through September of 2020, expanded its reach to a daily worldwide audience, and produced its first feature-length documentary The Dawn of Generation AI.

George is from Toledo, Ohio. He lives with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of rescue dogs in
Northern Virginia.