Adapt And Adopt: Lessons From The Navy’s High-Performance IT Transformation

How does an organization with 850,000 users and some of the world’s most demanding mission requirements innovate with startup-like speed? The US Department of the Navy tackled that challenge head on, transforming how it evaluates, adopts, and scales technology across the enterprise.

Join Forrester’s Lauren Nelson and Justin Fanelli, CTO of the US Department of the Navy, as they discuss the strategies, frameworks, and leadership principles behind the Navy’s modernization journey. Drawing on Forrester’s case study, they explore how the Navy cut deployment timelines from months to weeks, launched 18 innovation pilots in a single year after five years with none, achieved Zero Trust compliance years ahead of schedule, and scaled generative AI across the organization.

In this webinar, gain practical insights into the Navy’s “adapt and adopt” approach, including the Innovation Adoption Kit (IAK), methods for linking technology investments to mission outcomes, and lessons for overcoming bureaucracy, technical debt, and slow adoption cycles. Whether you’re in government or the private sector, get actionable ideas for accelerating innovation and delivering measurable business value through technology.

Key takeaways: 

• The Navy’s framework for accelerating innovation adoption at scale
• How to balance speed, security, and mission outcomes
• Lessons learned from enterprise AI, cloud, Zero Trust, and platform modernization initiatives
• How to build a culture that enables both rapid experimentation and disciplined execution

Target audience level: all levels