Michael Edward Gross, CISM

Director of Information Technology

Multi-site consumer-products manufacturer. Consolidated IT across four brands - Outdoor Cap, Junk Brands, Classic Caps, and Legendary - covering enterprise applications, software engineering, security, and analytics.

• Merged siloed engineering, support, infrastructure and analytics teams into one organization, removing a management tier and standardizing a root-cause workflow.
• Pioneered a governed AI program: enterprise coding assistants, automated ticket routing. Product management went from 4 PMs to 2 and the service desk from 3 to 2, with a 96.2% closure rate and 30% lower ticket volume.
• Stood up an MCP server giving AI least-privilege, fully audited access to ERP production databases over token auth and TLS.
• Delivered ‘Atlas’, the production-floor scheduling system that moved the embroidery floor onto a new layout against a 3,500 caps/day target.
• Launched enterprise IT portfolio reporting and self-service BI, removing IT as the reporting bottleneck.
• Renegotiated backup storage across a ~34 TiB estate for significant annual savings.

Division Chief, then Program Manager

• Led the National Identity Verification Program as Division Chief for UX research and testing, integrating USPS and Login.gov to serve 157,000+ claimants across nine states. 2024 Service to the Citizen Award.
• Accountable for the department’s $2B ARPA technology portfolio. Testified before the GAO across three inquiries, re-planned the portfolio through a sudden $1B rescission, and accelerated security accreditation by 37 days.

Virtual Chief Information Security Officer

• Built a portfolio cyber risk management program from scratch for a private equity firm’s eight healthcare and health-tech acquisitions.
• Assessed over 250 information security controls and established board-ready risk dashboards, which generated three follow-on engagements.
• Led an eight-person pre-launch technical review of a national consumer health platform’s MVP, validating data privacy and API security before deployment.

Chief Information Officer

Federal Medicare and Medicaid quality contractor. Full P&L and operational accountability for technology strategy, security compliance, engineering, and multi-state data center operations across 45+ staff.

• Wrote the organization’s first five-year IT roadmap and migrated legacy PowerBuilder applications to a low-code BPM platform, cutting future development labor by 30%.
• Captured over $1.2M in annual vendor savings, including a $936K contract consolidation, and rebalanced contractor-to-employee staffing for $700K a year while closing skill gaps.
• Grew local and cloud SAN capacity from 5 to over 40 petabytes, improving disaster recovery and analytics headroom.
• Ran the waterfall-to-Agile transition and stood up the enterprise PMO: on-time delivery moved from 62% to over 92%, satisfaction up 25 points.
• Architected the first production RPA, machine learning and OCR pipeline, saving analysts 1.6 hours per review and $600K annually.
• Held NIST, CMS and HIPAA Authority to Operate with zero major audit findings.

Director, Information Technology Division

Federal healthcare claims and community payment processing. IT operations and comptrollership for 100+ personnel, 700+ servers, 4 petabytes.

• Controlled an $80M annual operating budget under Franchise Fund rules, and partnered with CMS on eligibility transaction improvements worth $600K year over year.
• Led 50+ engineers and contractors building the Healthcare Claims Processing System on Pega BPM and Oracle ESB.
• Sustained 95%+ FISMA compliance with clean SSAE 16 and SOC 1 opinions, holding the center’s Authority to Operate.

Chief of Configuration & Requirements

• Program-managed the Distribution Standard System - a $65M OMB capital program across 28 global distribution centers, 5M+ line items and $37B in annual transactions.

Chief Information Officer (Facility)

VA hospital network serving veterans statewide. Took over a struggling IT organization mid-crisis.

• Directed a team of 31 federal civilians, 3 contractors, and 2 interns, with technical oversight of 62 servers, a 15TB SAN, and 2,500+ workstations across five medical facilities.
• Led the 9-month design and rollout of a bed-management system later adopted by 147 VA medical centers nationwide.
• Rebuilt help desk operations on ITIL best practices, clearing 800+ aged tickets and lifting SLA performance from 81% to 92% in three months.
• Restored a peer facility’s IT asset-tracking accuracy from below 70% to 95%, bringing it into full compliance with national standards.

Services Principal

• Grew the Pennsylvania account to $110M in scope. Led the B2B integration between PA’s SAP ERP and Dell’s ordering systems, cutting ordering cycles by 24 hours.

Where it started

• Eight enlisted years in nuclear operations aboard a nuclear-powered submarine: assistant work center supervisor, plant maintenance coordinator, QA inspector. Zero-defect safety compliance.
• Commissioned, then progressive leadership across enterprise IT and cyber. Retired as Lieutenant Commander.
• As Supply Officer, managed full logistics, contracting, and budget formulation, culminating in a 7th Fleet-wide logistics overhaul.
• Early in that assignment, led civilian and Navy personnel through database consolidations and stood up one of the Navy’s first unclassified email systems and satellite file transmission capabilities.
• Chaired architecture review boards through a data center consolidation that cut server count 67% and sysadmin staffing 50%.
• As information assurance lead, raised global cybersecurity accreditation compliance for 24,000+ users from 34% to 94%, and halved audit times with Lean Six Sigma.