Simon Szykman

  • The Office of Management and Budget wants to create a cyber playbook, and a digital services teams focused on IT security. Tony Scott, the federal CIO, said industry also must play a bigger role by automatically enabling two-factor authentication and using more secure chips.

    June 19, 2015
  • Five agencies score zero on using strong authentication with their IT networks. That's according to the White House's annual compliance review of the Federal Information Security Management Act. Nextgov reports three of those agencies had cybersecurity breaches in recent years. Simon Szykman is chief technology officer for the federal services division at Attain, and former chief information officer of the Commerce Department. He broke down the results from the 2014 FISMA review on In Depth with Francis Rose.

    March 11, 2015
  • Federal News Radio has been tracking the turnover of CIOs and other senior level IT officials between November 2013 and October 2014. All combined, the 23 total CIOs or senior IT leaders that either left government or changed jobs within government had 96 years of experience and their average tenure was 4.2 years.

    January 15, 2015
  • The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act is closer to passage as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. It will empower Chief Information Officers to make more budget decisions, and be more embedded in the strategic directions of federal agencies. Simon Szykman is Chief Technology Officer of Federal Services at Attain, and former chief information officer of the Commerce Department. Scott Quehl is Senior Principal at Accenture Federal Services, and former chief financial officer and Assistant Secretary for Administration at the Commerce Department. On In Depth with Francis Rose, they said there was no "one moment" the Commerce team decided to work collaboratively in the C-Suite.

    December 08, 2014
  • Simon Szykman is joining Attain as its chief technology officer of the federal services division.

    October 24, 2014
  • The former FAA and DHS CIO is taking a third tour of duty in government and will replace Simon Szykman.

    June 11, 2014
  • Simon Szykman announced to staff today he is leaving the agency to work in the private sector. He said he has no plans yet and will stay at the agency until a new CIO is hired. Additionally, Anil Karmel has left the NNSA after serving more than two years as the deputy chief technology officer to launch his own cloud computing company.

    February 20, 2014
  • The chief information and chief technology offices at the Commerce Department have generated more than $200 million in savings by taking a collaborative approach to purchasing IT and cybersecurity products.

    November 20, 2013
  • On the Federal Drive show blog, you can listen to our interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day, as well as links to other stories and resources we discuss.

    November 20, 2013
  • Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) plans to offer the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) as an amendment later this week to the 2013 Defense Authorization bill. The Senate held a hearing looking at the best approach to empower federal CIOs. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee heard that transparency, visibility and senior leadership are common traits among successful CIOs.

    June 12, 2013
  • On the one-year anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy, the CIO Council and DHS are expected to issue a security baseline and reference architecture for mobile computing. The goal of the document is not to give agencies new requirements but to focus on those security standards that are mobile-centric.

    May 03, 2013
  • The idea behind cyber threat intelligence is to understand more about the attack and the attacker than ever before by matching up patterns, anomalies and other characteristics of the bad guys. Energy, DoD, Commerce and DHS are all analyzing cyber attack data to develop this more complete picture.

    April 25, 2013
  • Scott Quehl, the CFO, and Simon Szykman, the CIO, work closely together on ensuring projects remain on track and are efficient as possible. Their relationship is making it easier for Commerce to deal with budget and oversight pressures.

    January 09, 2013
  • On the In Depth show blog, you can listen to the interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day and links to additional resources.

    June 06, 2012