Joseph Schafer

Dr. Joseph Schafer is a professor at the Defense Acquisition University, Defense Systems Management College. His focus includes management & leadership, cybersecurity, software development, and information technology service management, teaching, consulting and coaching.

Dr. Schafer enjoys leading start-ups and transformations where critical and creative thinking, nimble trade offs, and trusting relationships are keys to success. He supported worldwide enterprise data clients at Dell. As VP at L-3 Communications, he led the team to win and run the White House data center, desktop, service desk, security, database and applications contracts for the Executive Office of the President of the United States. He then led the team to win and dramatically improve performance and profitability (by more than $700k in one year) on Pentagon IT programs through technical and personnel management innovations.

His final job as a Soldier was to reorganize and re-energize a failing worldwide high-visibility acquisition, financial, and logistics enterprise software development effort supporting DoD’s $2B annual global relocation portfolio. Prior to that Dr. Schafer architected solutions and secured $300M for capital investments and led an international start-up team of 1,000+ to deliver urgent and sustainable IT and telecommunications systems in Iraq.

He has worked and traveled in 35+ countries and has US & Irish (European Union) citizenship.