Steve Cooper

Advisory Board

Steve Cooper serves as a member on the Advisory Board for Workstorm. Throughout his career, he has been a change agent. He served as the first chief information officer (CIO) of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and guided the deployment of the department’s network and infrastructure to combine twenty-two components and more than one hundred thousand employees.

Cooper also served as CIO of the Department of Commerce. While there, he was tasked with leading the department’s and bureaus’ information technology components to be more collaborative and more effective in information sharing and the modernization and enterprise-wide use of information technology in support of the department’s strategic plan: America – Open for Business.

As the CIO of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO), Cooper crafted its vision and strategy, and led the two-year transformation of the ATO’s IT organization, resulting in measured improvement via a customer focused, operationally excellent service delivery model.

Since his retirement from federal government service in 2017, Cooper has served on numerous boards, including Dell’s Federal Advisory Board, T-Mobile’s Federal Advisory Board, Samsung’s Federal Advisory Council, and Symantec’s Federal Advisory Board. His areas of expertise and experience include strategy development, strategy into action, performance management/metrics, risk management, cybersecurity strategy, business growth strategy and actions, IT modernization, IT shared services, IT as-a-service, IT budgeting and life cycle cost management, IT governance and compliance, and master data management.

Cooper received his BA from Ohio Wesleyan University. He was honorably discharged as a Naval Air Reserve petty officer following service during the Vietnam Era. He has been married nearly fifty years and is the father of four daughters, which remains, to this day, his most significant challenge.