Tom Soderstrom

Tom serves as the IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his mission is to identify and infuse new IT technologies into JPL’s environment. He has led a collaborative, practical, and hands-on approach with JPL and industry to investigate emerging industry IT technology trends that matter especially to JPL, NASA, and large enterprises. He is also leading adoption of the relevant emerging technologies at JPL.

Some of these include extreme collaboration, social networking, mobility, cyber security, green IT, IT Consumerization, visualization, big data, and Cloud computing. In short, enabling working with anyone from anywhere on any data and using any device.

Tom has led remote teams and large scale IT best practices development and change efforts in both small startups and large commercial companies, in international venues, and in the US Government arena. Some of the companies has worked for include Telos, enterWorks, User Technology Associates, Digital Island, Exodus, Cable & Wireless, and Raytheon.

Tom has been both a frequent producer and consumer of advanced collaboration and engineering tools and practices as his ventures have always included a highly distributed workforce that required advanced collaboration practices. Emerging technologies such as Cloud Computing promise to make this easier, but will they?