Dr. Patrick O’Connell joined the Department of the Navy in January 2016 as the Executive Director to the Chief of Naval Personnel via an industry-to-government exchange program. His primary remit was to lead the modernization and transformation of the enterprise’s “hire to retire” organizational structures, processes, activities and technologies for the Navy’s Manpower, Personnel, and Training & Education organizations serving active, reserve and dependent personnel. After setting the foundations and delivering the first new capabilities, Dr. O’Connell was selected as the Navy’s first Chief Digital Transformation Officer with the charter to lead, coordinate, orchestrate and accelerate the end-to-end digital transformation of the Navy to a digital service. Dr. O’Connell has over 35 years of executive experience optimizing major scale organizations for complex, high-value, technology based businesses in the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. His domain experience spans the Health, Defense, NATO and the Civil sectors. For the 20 years previous to the Navy, he served as the division or sector CEO or President in companies to include Raytheon, Thales, British Telcom, CH2M Hill, and Serco, focusing on exceptional growth, major enterprise turnarounds and transformations, and recovering and/or starting ultra-large public-private programs. Dr. O’Connell has a PhD in Computer Science and co-founded a new Master of Science degree in Major Program Management at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, England. He subsequently helped establish and structure the UK government’s Major Projects Leadership Academy, which was designed to advise senior UK government leadership on structuring and de-risking ultra-large national-level programs. He lectured at Oxford as the Practitioner Director for eight years and became the Chairman of the Advisory Board, Center for Major Program Management. Today, he frequently lectures in the George Washington University’s Executive MBA program.