Navy CTO’s DevOps playbook for tech debt
The harder management question is governance. Tech debt rarely shrinks through engineering effort alone; it requires explicit decision rights on what gets maintained, modernized, consolidated, or retired. The article points to a practical signal: user experience and operational friction can be used as portfolio inputs, not just service desk noise. CIOs should ask whether they have a structured decommissioning process with funding, owners, and success measures, or whether new tools are simply being added faster than old ones are removed.
There is also an operating-model implication in the shift from “construction workers to gardeners.” That metaphor suggests continuous cultivation, selective scaling, and patience for uneven pilot maturity. For leadership teams, this means changing incentives: reward measurable adoption, resilience, and simplification, not just launch volume. Faster acquisition and AI-enabled productivity gains are valuable, but they can also accelerate sprawl if architectural guardrails and lifecycle controls lag behind.
Practical next questions:
- Which applications or platforms have no clear retirement path?
- What metrics trigger modernization versus decommissioning decisions?
- Are pilot teams accountable for downstream support, integration, and security impacts?
- Can AI and automation reduce debt, or are they increasing the number of assets to govern?
NEW YORK — Overhauling technology across a global organization is a complicated undertaking — especially when those assets are quite literally out to sea.
For Justin Fanelli, CTO at the U.S. Department of the Navy, the strategy includes balancing experimentation with maintaining operations in an effort to deliver on the outcomes that best support sailors and staff in defending the country.
Fanelli, who participated in a fireside chat at Forrester’s recent Technology & Innovation Forum East, said in a separate interview with InformationWeek that part of his process includes a pipeline of technology pilots in development while current tech remains in use — both tech streams work in tandem to maintain operations while driving change at the speed the Navy needs.
He also said user experience surveys help gauge software’s performance and identify when tech is noticeably slow or not effective and needs to be refreshed.
What he found useful was to nurture technology pilots as if they were seeds in a garden and harvesting those seeds when they’ve developed into something that warrants implementation.
“If something sprouts up and that carrot is ready, then we’re taking that carrot and moving with it,” he said in the interview.
Fanelli noted that some pilots might take longer to demonstrate value and are allowed to develop in the background.
This approach did call for some rethinking by his team. “We’ve had to shift from [being like] construction workers to gardeners,” he said.
The changing tides
Rethinking the development approach paid off.
In 2025, the Navy won Forrester’s Technology Strategy Impact Award for North America for delivering on “scalable innovation at speed” in its transformation. This led to freeing up hundreds of millions in budget as the Navy dealt with its tech debt and reinvested in modernization, according to a Forrester blog post.
The steps the Navy took narrowed its acquisition cycles from 12 to 18 months to several weeks and introduced a generative AI assistant that contributed to a 20% to 30% boost in productivity. The department also achieved zero trust compliance for its secure cloud environment, called Flank Speed, three years earlier than scheduled.
During his fireside chat, Fanelli spoke with Lauren Nelson, senior vice president and research director at Forrester, about the scale and scope of the Navy’s modernization efforts. Fanelli, who has served as CTO of the military’s maritime arm since 2023, oversees the technology that supports some 850,000 sailors, Marines and civilians. When contractors are included in the mix that can balloon to 1.5 million individuals, according to Nelson.
The Navy’s highly mobile nature, as it operates across the world’s oceans, complicates issues such as tool sprawl and tech debt, Fanelli said.
“I will buy you a coffee if you find an organization with more tech debt than us,” he said jokingly to Nelson.
At times, there were maybe 30 different versions of software running across the Navy’s ships, Fanelli said, because they are not always accessible for updates at the same time.
“It’s a pretty big problem scale-wise,” he said.
Seasoned experience with the dev cycle
Fanelli has his share of practical understanding of the Navy’s operational needs. His career includes serving as an electrical engineer with the Navy, chief systems engineer with the Defense Information Systems Agency and as chief architect for the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic.
Modern demands for new software development are breaking old definitions of speed in the DevOps cycle, he said. The pace of transformation went from paradigm shifts to quantum leaps and now to post-exponential coding, also known as vibe coding.
Fanelli said the over-availability of tech resources at times contributed to sprawl. For example, when 100 apps prove popular that can swell to numbers in the thousands as users add more software to the ecosystem, he said. Trying to get performance back up to speed while being bogged down with such tech debt might not be viable.
“We’re running against Usain Bolt, and he has a lead. Even if you sprint as hard as you can, you’re going to fall farther behind,” Fanelli said.
With the help of agents, he said a structured divestment, or carve-out, of software that can be deprecated can remove some of those fetters.
Building momentum for change can be its own challenge, especially in a vast organization such as the Department of the Navy. Fanelli said a significant transformation doesn’t require a 100% overhaul of all systems and resources, but he does think about ensuring the Navy gets its hands on tools to support internal adoption and growth.
“We want smart speed. We want scalable speed. We want so much speed that you can go slower sometimes,” he said.
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