From Bureaucracy to Breakthroughs: Changing the Face of Government Technology | The Pair Program Ep31

Interested in a career in govtech?

In this episode, we hear from Alissa Bookwalter and Bryon Kroger – two professionals who have made a huge impact in modernizing the federal space.

They discuss:

• The traits that they look for in employees who want to join the govtech space
• What it takes to truly bring modernization into the federal space
• Common misconceptions about working in the government space
• How they’ve successfully “hacked bureaucracy”

About the guests:

Alissa Bookwalter currently serves as the Chief Talent Officer at the Griffiss Institute (GI), where her work seeks to impact and inspire the federal government’s next generation of technical talent. Prior to the GI, Alissa served as a Chief of Staff at Kessel Run, Deputy Director of Talent Management at the United States Digital Service, and supported military health programs for over 10 years.

Bryon Kroger is Founder and CEO of Rise8. Before that, he spent seven years as a targeteer using terrible software, which led him to cross-train to acquisitions and spend his first year building a transformation at AFLCMC, ultimately becoming one of three co-founders of Kessel Run. Bryon served as Kessel Run COO for two years, leading acquisitions, development, and operations for the enterprise-scale software lab that defined DoD DevSecOps. There he pioneered the first cATO alongside many other DoD "firsts". Bryon later launched Rise8 in 2019 to help change agents overcome bureaucracy and transform the way they build and deploy software to create outcomes in prod. He has built several cATOs from the ground up on both sides of the aisle and is a leading expert on the topic, as well as defense digital transformation and bureaucracy hacking more generally.

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