Frank Hamel Bio

Chief Technology Officer, The GDA Group

Mr. Hamel is the Chief Technology Officer for The GDA Group.   He oversees the Proposal Department and leads the IT Solutions department.  He is a Subject Matter Expert on projects that require Prototyping, Proof of Concept, Rapid Application Development, and Minimally Viable Products (MVPs). He has been a consultant on numerous projects for the Department of Defense, Intelligence Agencies, and a few commercial projects.  He is the “Top Gun” in IT Solutions.  He has technical certifications and is cleared to the top secret level with CI polygraph.

Upon graduating from Bradley University, with a B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering, he was commissioned into the US Air Force as a Second Lieutenant, having participated in the ROTC program at Bradley.  The Air Force assigned him to the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at the Cheyenne Mountain Space Defense Center. Mr. Hamel, as an Air Force Captain, oversaw a major enhancement of NORADS Cheyenne Mountain’s Space Defense Center. This included hands-on work developing the SDC’s new Man Machine Interface.

Upon separating from the Air Force, as a Captain, he was hired by TRW to work on the CAMS program for which he received numerous awards. When faced with a critical obsolete hardware issue, Mr. Hamel’s team developed an architecture and provided a solution to migrate a critical enterprise-level legacy application from a hardwired terminal to a modern GUI running on Unix Workstations. The issue was resolved by changing very little of the IBM Mainframe Custom Application.

After a seventeen-year career with TRW, he began a career as a Technical Consultant, often as an employee of a Defense Contractor, who would hold his security clearance.

Frank has worked on many projects as a Solutions Architect, we will provide some of the highlights of this long career.  

He was a consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the Lead Developer to solve several major problems with the Enterprise Software.   He performed a prototype for four of the five goals and led a five-person team to implement solutions. FBI management approved the prototypes and agreed to implement them into the product. A cohesive operational system was delivered. The result was a very satisfied customer.

He was Under Contract to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Ft. Liberty, NC, as a Hands-on cloud manager, he managed a team of over twenty cloud engineers. As a hands-on contributor, he resolved several reliability issues and introduced a system to allow simulated classified development to be done using unclassified resources, reducing the number of cleared personnel needed onsite.

Frank, as the Lead Cloud Developer Under contract to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), reported directly to the Program Manager. The solution delivered required extensive prototyping and experimentation.  Through his extensive knowledge and ability, the issue was resolved on time and budget.

He has a distinguished career having served in numerous Defense Projects and Intelligence Agencies, always in the capacity of the lead IT consultant. 

Mr. Hamel, as a consultant to the Defense Logistics Agency, developed a programmatic interface to SharePoint without using the standard API due to limitations in the provider’s offering. He developed extensive prototyping and experimentation using a combination of simulated servers, multiple browsers, and multiple versions of software.

Mr. Hamel, as a consultant to the Army IT Agency, and Chief Technology Officer, Proposed, prototyped, integrated, demonstrated, and documented a new cloud-based system architecture for testing new software products and services.

He was a long-time contributor to the TRW CAMS program. The CIA’s global CAMS system was using dumb terminal hardware that was unrepairable and becoming obsolete. Mr. Hamel developed a new GUI-based architecture and provided a solution to migrate a critical enterprise-level legacy application from a hardwired terminal to a modern GUI running on Unix workstations. Other work done for the CAMS system consisted of:

  • A full-scale system simulator
  • A full-scale acceptance test.
  • A script-based automation and testing capability.
  • A new archive system based on tape.
  • Migration to new versions of two different operating systems, IBM VM 370 and IBM CMS 370.

Mr. Hamel received numerous awards for his work on the CAMS program.