Child Welfare,
Foster Care,
Crisis Incident Response,
Business Process Engineering
Marina Nitze works on improving America’s foster care system. She created and runs the Child Welfare Playbook and its corresponding 18-state working group that surfaces and scales promising practices in foster family recruitment, retention, licensing, and placement. Marina is also currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina was most recently the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education. She serves on the board of TurbineOne and advisory boards of Foster America, Smartsheet, and Think of Us; created TaskTackler, the personal productivity app for Type-A personalities; and authored the books Hack Your Bureaucracy (Hachette, 2022) and Business Efficiency for Dummies (Wiley, 2012). She lives in Seattle, WA.