Building the DoD’s First CX Office: Reflections from the Modernization Exchange 2025
At the Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange 2025, I had the opportunity to reflect on one of the most challenging and rewarding chapters of my career—standing up the Pentagon’s first-ever Customer Experience Office from the ground up.
When then-DoD CIO John Sherman asked me to lead this brand-new effort, there was no playbook. His guidance? “We don’t yet know, but we’ll figure it out as we go.” Nearly 18 months later, that vision has evolved into an office driving real, enterprisewide impact across one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world.
Turning Vision into Structure
One of the first—and hardest—steps was defining what “customer experience” really meant in a defense context. In a global enterprise like DoD, priorities compete, missions evolve, and language varies. Creating shared understanding was critical. We had to articulate why CX matters, tie it directly to mission outcomes, and build a strategic framework people could rally around.
To do that, we focused the office around four core pillars:
Strategic Guidance – Anchored in our Fulcrum IT Advancement Strategy, this pillar helped orient efforts and establish direction.
IT Governance – Bringing visibility into what’s working (and what’s not) across the tech landscape.
Performance Management – Grounding experience in data, metrics, and business alignment to move beyond subjectivity.
User Experience – The result of it all: meaningful, continuous improvements for service members, civilians, and mission partners.
Establishing the Baseline
In the first year, our priority was to get a clear picture of the CX landscape across DoD—what tools, people, and processes already existed. We discovered many organizations were collecting feedback, but not in consistent or scalable ways. Even basic metrics, like PC boot-up time, became complex in a department with inconsistent data structures and fragmented systems.
That insight led to the formation of the first-ever UX Consortium, a space where military departments, IT leads, and CX experts could collaborate, align on language, and share best practices. In an environment as decentralized as DoD, creating those connections was a breakthrough—and, honestly, one of the most powerful outcomes of our work.
What’s Next
As we look ahead to the next phase of modernization, I’m optimistic. With new AI tools, better data pipelines, and a shared commitment to outcome-driven transformation, the opportunity to design digital experiences that truly serve our defense community is greater than ever.
Standing up the CXO office was never just about technology—it was about building trust, improving clarity, and creating space for people to do their best work. I’m proud of how far we’ve come and excited for where the journey goes next.
