The Commerce Department is getting a new deputy chief information officer.

Industry and government sources confirm Kirit Amin is heading over to Commerce from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In addition to being the deputy CIO, Amin will be the chief technology officer.

He is expected to start in his new roles Nov. 19.

Amin joined HUD in February as the chief technology and innovation officer. Before that he was the CIO for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs for five years, where he left in October 2011 and subsequently came under fire for comments made about the Foreign Service.

As the deputy CIO and CTO at Commerce, Amin will work a variety of activities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT spending, and will lead the strategic management of IT resources throughout the department, helping to ensure that programs make effective and efficient use of IT, according to the job posting from July on USAJobs.gov.

Amin's responsibilities also include:

• Assessing current and emerging technologies, IT service delivery models, including shared services, and IT management best practices.
• Developing strategies, implementation and migration plans aimed at both department enterprisewide and CIO-level IT portfolios.
• Leading the collaborative development of business cases, as well as cost and reimbursement models supporting implementation of multi-organization shared services, infrastructure consolidation initiatives, and migration to emerging IT service delivery models, including cloud computing.
• Serving as a technical strategic advisor on projects requiring high level strategy, alignment, technical vision, management evaluation and oversight.

He will report to Simon Szykman, Commerce's CIO. Szykman has been leading an effort to improve how the department buys IT by consolidating duplicative contracts to buy computers and software.

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