About Me

I’m a technology leader and national-security policy advisor with a background in government and Silicon Valley. I am currently with VMware Research Group, and recently spent seven years as the Director of Microsoft’s esteemed Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments. I’m based in Washington DC.

I like to write about society, government, and technology. I started as a fairly fuzzy technologist, with an early career in political science both academic and practical – I’ve worked at all levels of government, most recently as a senior executive in the federal government but earlier for the mayors of several major American cities.

I’ve always been an early adopter of information technologies, and moved to Palo Alto in 1984, spending the next two decades working in and around Silicon Valley. After the 9/11 attacks, I focused on technologies to support the Intelligence Community. In 2003 I accepted an offer to work directly inside the community, becoming Senior Technology Officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency. I spent almost five years participating in a remarkable period of innovation and reform for the intelligence community. Some of our best work focused on information sharing, better analysis, and Web 2.0 capabilities; my group did the early work on well-known IC-wide projects like Intellipedia, A-Space, and the IC Data Layer.

Feel free to email me at lewisshepherd@alumni.stanford.edu.