Steven VanRoekel, who worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2009, replaces Vivek Kundra, who is stepping down as federal chief information officer to take up a fellowship at Harvard University.<\/p>\n
As CIO, VanRoekel will direct policy and strategic planning for government information technology and will be responsible for the $80 billion in annual federal technology spending.<\/p>\n
At Microsoft, VanRoekel was an assistant to Bill Gates and the senior director of the US software giant’s Windows Server and Tools Division.<\/p>\n
VanRoekel left Microsoft in 2009 to serve as managing director of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).<\/p>\n
He left the FCC earlier this year to serve as executive director of citizen and organizational engagement at the US Agency for International Development.<\/p>\n
Kundra, the US government’s first CIO, was charged by Obama with improving performance and lowering the cost of government operations through the use of technology.<\/p>\n
Kundra has piloted a government move to greater reliance on Internet-based “cloud” computing and a number of other initiatives including a website called Data.gov, which provides ufiltered access to government data for use by the public, and another called IT Dashboard, which tracks IT spending.<\/p>\n
Obama relied heavily on the Internet during his presidential campaign for organizing, fundraising and communicating and has created MySpace, Facebook and Flickr pages and a Twitter feed since entering the White House.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Barack Obama appointed a former Microsoft executive on Thursday as the new government technology chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":30992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[36,123,3422,3424],"class_list":["post-30990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-active","tag-microsoft","tag-steven-vanroekel","tag-vivek-kundra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30994,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30990\/revisions\/30994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}