After two and a half years leading the federal government’s IT efforts, Suzette Kent told staff Thursday she plans to leave the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer come July.
Kent is the fourth person to serve as the permanent Federal CIO since the moniker was bestowed on the leader of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of E-Government in 2009. Prior to joining government service in January 2018, Kent was a principal with global accounting firm Ernst & Young’s financial services practice, with a focus on payroll services and technology.
During her time at OMB, Kent led an ambitious policy overhaul that saw substantive updates to the government’s central IT tenets. Over the last two and a half years, OFCIO has updated more than half a dozen policies, chief among them:
The office also released the first comprehensive, governmentwide Federal Data Strategy, accompanied by a One-Year Action Plan.
Her tenure also saw dramatic changes to the federal workforce, including the shift to mass telework to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an effort to meet some of these challenges, Kent and her office established the Federal Reskilling Academy, with the goal of teaching career federal employees new IT and cybersecurity skills to help fill the workforce gaps. That program was tripped up by the rigid federal employment hierarchy of the General Schedule, though leaders across government are federal suzette tells staff retiring
