Joe Klimavicz will become the Justice Department’s new chief information officer.

Justice confirmed Klimavicz will leave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after spending more than seven years as its CIO and director of high performance computing and communications.

Klimavicz succeeds Luke McCormack, who moved to the Homeland Security Department to become its CIO last fall.

The decision to hire Klimavicz may seem a bit surprising on the surface. But over his 32-year career, he worked at the Defense Department as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deputy CIO and at the CIA.

Zachary Goldstein is NOAA’s deputy CIO and the likely candidate to be acting until the agency hires someone permanently. Goldstein has been the deputy since January 2011.

Klimavicz’s decision to leave means the Commerce Department is losing two of its longest serving CIOs. Simon Szykman, the headquarters CIO, announced in February he was stepping down after seven years in government. Szykman is expected to leave Commerce early this summer.

During his tenure at NOAA, Klimavicz led the effort to put the agency in the cloud, starting by 25,000 employees to an email-as-a-service setup.

Additionally, Klimavicz established the NOAALink contract to modernize the agency’s network infrastructure and implement enterprisewide share services, such as virtualized services, object reuse, security controls and continuous monitoring.

RELATED STORIES:

McCormack heading back to DHS as its CIO

Commerce CIO Szykman to leave after 7 years

NOAA leans on the lessons of others to move to the cloud

Shared services is new default for federal CIOs

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.