Lewis Shepherd is the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft’s
Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, based in
Washington DC. The Institute focuses on innovative solutions to
major enterprise-wide problems of national, state, and local
governments, leveraging Microsoft’s $7 billion annual R&D
budget.
Mr. Shepherd’s career includes work in government at the
federal, state, and local levels, and fifteen years in the
private sector in Silicon Valley. For four years (2004-2007),
Shepherd was Senior Technology Officer at the Defense
Intelligence Agency, and led R&D for next-generation technology
for the Department of Defense intelligence community, which has
an information technology (IT) budget in excess of $1 billion
per year. He was responsible for information management
strategic planning and served as the senior consultant for the
director of DIA on technology innovation, overseeing business
case analyses and evaluating technology investments for the
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in conjunction with
other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community. Shepherd was
promoted to the federal government’s Senior Executive Service in
February 2006. According to ComputerWorld magazine in 2007, “DIA
and other defense agencies have become the most advanced users
of Web 2.0 tools in the federal government."
Lewis Shepherd was educated at Stella Maris College in Gzira,
Malta, and St. Mary’s College in Galway, Ireland. He received a
B.A. in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of
Virginia (CLAS ’82), graduating with Honors; a post-graduate
degree in French from the Université Libre de Bruxelles
(Belgium); and a Master’s degree in Political Science from
Stanford University. During three years of study in the Ph.D.
program at Stanford from 1984-1987, he worked on contract as a
Soviet foreign policy analyst in the Office of Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger. He was a graduate teaching fellow for
undergraduate classes at Stanford and the University of
Virginia, and has been a guest lecturer for MBA courses at
Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
During the late 1980s and 1990s he held senior public and
private executive positions in California, including serving as
Director of Communications for the Mayor of San Francisco and
senior policy advisor to the Mayor of San Jose, California
(known as “the Capital of Silicon Valley”). From 1998-2000 he
was Vice President of Clinton Reilly Group, a leading West Coast
government consulting firm, and from 2000-2003 was an executive
with a successful Silicon Valley artificial-intelligence startup
company.
Mr. Shepherd was the recipient of the 2005 DIA Medal for
Meritorious Civilian Service, and the Government Computing News
2007 “National IT Leadership” award. He has previously received
a Ford Foundation Fellowship in International Security, a
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship for
study overseas, and the 1988 National Press Club Annual Authors
Award. He has coauthored two books on U.S. and international
politics, and published numerous articles on public affairs. He
lives in Virginia’s Northern Neck with his wife Kathryn, an
attorney and lecturer at the U.S. Supreme Court.