FTC looking for a new CIO; DISA finds a replacement

On to greener pastures, almost literally. Bajinder Paul, who spent the last 17 months as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief information officer, now is with the Federal Reserve Bank.

A bank spokeswoman confirmed that Paul is the associate director for IT in the Division of Reserve Bank Operations and Payment Systems. He started in his new position last week, sources confirmed.

Patricia Bak is the acting CIO at the FTC until a new one is named. The FTC put out the job announcement on USAJobs.gov, looking for “primary executive with direct oversight of the OCIO and as the principal information technology and information security advisor to the Executive Director and other high-level Commission officials. The CIO is also responsible for strategic planning, developing, organizing, directing, and maintaining a comprehensive information technology and information resources management strategic plan that aligns to the agency business strategy, and for ensuring critical IT investments that impact business results are funded.”

Paul’s move to the Reserve Bank was a bit surprising. He came to the FTC in September 2013 and sought to modernize the agency’s IT infrastructure.

Paul said in August 2014 that the FTC could take big advantage of cloud computing, especially around data analytics. But after only a year plus, he’s moving back the financial community.

Before coming to the FTC, Paul spent almost three years at the General Services Administration as the deputy associate administrator of citizen services and innovation technology and more than three years as the CIO of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency.

In other personnel news, the Defense Information Systems Agency named John Hickey to replace Mark Orndorff, who retired after 35-plus years in government on Jan. 31.

Orndorff held the role as program executive officer for mission assurance for several years before DISA’s recent reorg, which gave him a new title of risk management executive and CIO.

Hickey has been DISA’s program manager for mobility for the last almost three years. In that role, Hickey has focused on moving DISA toward offering secure commercial mobile devices — listen to DoD reporter Jared Serbu’s interview with Hickey from July.

Another Defense agency also will have a new CIO on Feb. 15. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency restructured its IT shops and named Douglas McGovern as its new CIO.

McGovern will replace David White , who will serve as NGA’s first fellow to the recently established intelligence and national security foundation.

The change mergers the CIO and the IT services office into a new construct.

“NGA is at a pivotal crossroads where policy and business processes must move as quickly as IT implementation,” said NGA Director Robert Cardillo in a release. “Executing new missions and leveraging new sources, along with our traditional missions and sources, require us to unify our IT management with IT delivery and sustainment. This merger will enable additional agility to accelerate IT delivery of capabilities while fully leveraging ICITE and incorporating new data sources.”

David Bottom will move from the director of the IT service division to lead the agency’s leader development program.

What’s interesting about this merger is no one wants to talk about it. Two former NGA CIOs declined to comment, or at least the companies they work for said they didn’t want to make them available.

I also asked the Intelligence and National Security Association (INSA) to see if they had anyone available to comment. They also deferred.

The cynical reporter in me says there’s something more going on here than meets the eye.

I talked to White in November for my Ask the CIO show and I found him to be articulate and to have a solid grasp on how to modernize NGA. Among his top priorities were ICITE, where NGA is working with the Defense Intelligence Agency to deliver the common enterprise desktop to the intelligence community, which includes awarding the second part of the desktop environment contract in 2015, and using the cloud more effectively for geospatial intelligence.

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