John Thomas Flynn was the first Chief Information Officer for both the State of California and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the former President of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). Since 2006, he has been the producer and host of TechLeader.TV, a Webcast and television program in California focusing of government, technology and politics.
For three decades, he has been at the center of the renaissance to upgrade the public sector’s management and utilization of its information technology assets. He was appointed by Governor Bill Weld to be the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ first Chief Information Officer (CIO), becoming arguably the first state CIO in the U.S. He also became the State of California’s first CIO appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1995.
Prior to his to State CIO service, he spent over a decade with systems integrators where he led teams designing and developing scores of financial, statistical, and operational reporting application systems for public sector organizations throughout the U.S.
For over six years he served as an officer in NASCIO, the association which represents state CIO’s, and in 1997 he was elected their President. He was an advisor to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s transition team and the California Performance Review. In 2006 he created the nation’s first live video Webcast program on public sector technology issues WWW.TechLeader.TV, now seen by over one million viewers.
He has been a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Information Technology Advisory Board since 1995, focusing on the federal government’s implementation of Clinger-Cohen Act which instituted CIO’s in federal agencies. He was a member of the faculty at Drexel University, College of Information Science and Technology, Sacramento Campus in 2008-2009, and also taught at Northeastern University and Emmanuel College in Boston. He served on advisory boards at the Haas School of Business, at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Sacramento State’s College of Engineering & Computer Science.
He served in White House-appointed positions in both the Reagan Administration and that of George H.W. Bush at the Federal Regional Council, a White House intergovernmental coordinating organization, and at the U.S. Department of Labor.
An acknowledged leader and visionary, he has written and spoken extensively on effective government operations, and government’s ability and capacity to successfully manage its information technology assets.
