Ask the CIO

Department of State

Susan Swart Chief Information Officer Sept. 11th, 2008

Federal News Network Staff

September 8, 2008 1:44 pm

< a min read

Susan Swart – Chief Information Officer

The State Department’s Chief Information Officer must meet the needs of embassies and consulates around the world.

That means dealing with inconsistent power and other infrastructure issues on a daily basis.

Susan Swart, the department’s CIO since February, has a lot of experience in understanding the technical challenges embassies and consulates have around the world.

She spent 19 years a foreign service officer in places such as Cairo and Caracas, Venezuela.

Swart says having this experience has helped her develop priorities and ensure State’s information technology needs are being met.

Because of the decentralized nature of State, Swart is bringing the agency under common enterprise services, such as e-mail, data center consolidation and the department’s major initiative, State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART).

Swart says State will test the second part of SMART later this month, which will be the initial version of the messaging system.