White House Taps Former Microsoft CIO Tony Scott
The White House late last week said it has named Tony Scott as its CIO. This will only be the third person charged with overseeing the nation's overall IT infrastructure. Scott, who served as Microsoft's CIO, also served that role for Disney and VMware and was CTO at GM.
Scott's official title will be U.S. CIO and Administrator of OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, succeeding Steve VanRoekel. The first CIO was Vivek Kundra, who launched the government's Cloud First initiative. The Obama Administration will task Scott with implementing its Smarter IT Delivery agenda outlined in the president's 2016 proposed budget.
I actually first met Scott when he was GM's CTO in the late 1990s when he spoke at a Forrester conference about managing large vendors, which included Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and numerous others including some startups during the dot-com era. I later caught up with him more than a decade later attending Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in 2010 in Washington, D.C.
Among his key initiatives at the time as Microsoft's CIO was enabling the internal use of new technologies the company had recently brought to market, among them Azure. "I think we've done what Microsoft always has done traditionally, which is we try to dog-food our own stuff and get the bugs out and make sure the functionality is there," he said during an interview at WPC, though he qualified that by adding: "We'll move them or migrate them as the opportunity arises and as the business case makes sense."
Nevertheless he was known as a proponent of cloud-enabling internal applications as quickly as possible. Scott's tenure at Microsoft ran from 2008 until 2013 and he has spent the past two years at VMware.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/09/2015 at 12:49 PM