Army Corps, ATF, EEOC welcome new CIOs

Reporter's Notebook

Army Corps, ATF, EEOC welcome new CIOs

Greg Garcia is taking over as the new chief information officer at the Army Corps of Engineers. He is one of several new CIOs agencies named over the last month.

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

January 18, 2016 4:45 am

3 min read

A couple of interesting changes in the federal IT community took place over the last week or so.

First off, Greg Garcia is moving over to become the Army Corps of Engineers’ new chief information officer. Garcia comes to the Corps of Engineers after spending the last three-plus years leading the Army IT Agency.

Garcia replaces Robert Kazimer, who left in December to take a new job in the organization.

The move to the Army Corps of Engineers is an interesting one for Garcia, who starts in late January.

Garcia has been running the Army IT Agency, which is an enterprise service provider for the Pentagon and others in the Washington, D.C. area. He led the ITA’s efforts to provide IT and communications services.

But DoD decided in July to create a single shared-service entity to serve all the military offices in the Pentagon.

While it was unclear if Garcia would be out of a job, ITA was being subsumed into the new Joint IT Single Service Provider-Pentagon organization.

Kazimer said back in December 2011 on my Ask the CIO program that a big focus for him was protecting the Corps’ infrastructure from cyber attack. Kazimer was CIO for the Army Corps for almost six years. Garcia has spent a lot of time worrying about and ensuring a large organization’s cybersecurity is strong, so this will be a new challenge that’s right up his alley.

Over at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Roger Beasley received the promotion from deputy to acting to finally full-time CIO about a month or two ago.

Multiple sources confirmed Beasley’s promotion to replace Rick Holgate, who left in September and now is an analyst for the research firm Gartner.

Before coming to ATF, Beasley was a year-long detail to the Justice Department and worked as the director of the operations services staff at the Justice Management Division.

Sources also confirmed that Tori Gold will come back to ATF as its deputy CIO in the coming weeks after a detail to the Justice Management Division.

Beasely’s promotion fills one of several openings for technology executives within DoJ bureaus.

Currently, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration are looking for new CIOs while Justice headquarters CIO Joe Klimavicz is hiring a new deputy CIO.

Speaking of openings, the Veterans Affairs Department continues to replenish its IT executive ranks.

Nicole Mayerhauser joined VA as its executive director for enterprise project management. She replaces Greg Giddens, who took on a new role in April as executive director of VA’s office of acquisition, logistics and construction.

Mayerhauser joined VA on Jan. 11 after serving as the division chief of the National Income and Wealth Division for the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department for the past four-plus years.

VA also announced as of Jan. 1 its Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO) officially came online.

Deputy Assistant Secretary Rob Thomas switches roles, moving to the EPMO after joining VA as the assistant deputy chief information officer for integration in March 2015.

Finally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission quietly named a new CIO in December. Bryan Burnett came over to the commission after spending the last year as the CIO of the National Labor Relations Board.

Burnett replaced Kim Hancher, who retired in September, after 34 years in government.

One other non-IT, but interesting move: Lynn Williams, the main staff member on the House Armed Services Committee working on acquisition and industrial base policy matters, joined the Congressional Research Service in January.

Williams has spent the last decade working on the Hill around Defense Department policy matters.
With Williams leaving and Troy Cribb, who recently joined the General Services Administration as the associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy, there is dearth of talented people on Capitol Hill who understand acquisition issues. As one industry source recently said to me, “I can count the number on one hand.”