Steven VanRoekel 41, a Microsoft veteran of 15 years, who left Microsoft in 2009 to join the Obama administration has been appointed as the chief information officer (CIO) for the federal government, and will assume responsibility on Friday, reported the New York Times.
VanRoekel replaces Vivek Kundra the first U.S. CIO, who in June announced his plans to become a joint fellow at the Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
The U.S. Government spends around $ 80 billion every year on information technology, which is more than any corporation. Yet, analysts are of the opinion that the government has not achieved the private sector equivalent of productivity gains from its technology investment.
Jefferey D. Zients, chief performance officer and deputy director for Management, Office of Management and Budget said the long-term trend of productivity growth in the private sector has been about 1.5 percent every year, while the corresponding growth in the government has been less than one-third of that level.
Stating that the government believed that the use of information technology is the single biggest reason for the gap between the public and private sector, Zients further said that senior administration officials came into the office convinced that the computing technology could be used more intelligently to save more money, reduce waste and generally make the government work better.
In this direction, Kundra, 36 spearheaded the effort to overhaul the government’s approach to technology for more than two years. Coming in with an ambitious agenda he managed to make some progress. Kundra recalled that when he arrived at the White House, he was handed a thick pile of papers, detailing $27 billion in technology projects that were running in excess of the budget but falling behind the schedule.
As a solution, the administration developed an IT Dashboard, a website accessible to the public which tracks the spending and progress of federal technology projects. Along with his team Kundra used the IT Dashboard to conduct TechStat sessions and reviews of the government’s largest and most troubled technology initiatives. Consequently, projects were pared back or eliminated thereby saving $ 3billion, according to government estimates.
Under Kundra’s guidance, the government is shifting to cloud computing and has also adopted a software that shares computing tasks across several machines in a data center, reducing the number of computers and data centers needed.
The government has also begun a program wherein it intends to shut down 800 of its 2,000 data centers over the next four years. The target is to close 195 centers this year. Also, the pace of technology projects has been sped up. The average time to deliver a software application or component has been cut down to 8 months from 24 months.
VanRoekel said that he intended to begin where Kundra left off. “Rarely do you get to take over in a place where so much good work has been done and so much momentum is already established with teams charging ahead at full steam,” he said on Thursday, just after the White House announced his appointment.
VanRoekel left Microsoft in 2009 when he was Senior Director of Windows Server. He also served as a Director of Web Services and as a speech and strategy assistant to the then CEO Bill Gates. His first job at the software giant was as a premier support and presales technical advisor.
After leaving Microsoft VanRoekel became the Managing Director of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In June 2011, he took a job with the U.S. Agency for International Development as Executive Director for Citizen and Organizational Engagement.
On his latest designation VanRoekel said, “We’re trying to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government.”