Bush names new US 'CIO'
Published: 04 Sep 2003 11:10 BST
President Bush has picked US Department of Energy chief information officer Karen Evans to become administrator of information technology and e-government for the federal government.
Evans, a 20-year veteran of the Washington, D.C., bureaucracy, succeeds Mark Forman, who said last month he was leaving because the government didn't pay him well enough.
Bush's announcement, released on Wednesday, said Evans will become the associate director of information technology and e-government at the US Office of Management and Budget, located in the White House -- a post sometimes referred to as the government's chief information officer.
Before taking the Energy Department position, Evans ran the Information Resources Management Division at the US Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs. The office provides funding for programmes including Safe Schools, Safe Start, Community Prosecution and Native American Tribal Courts. Since December 2002, Evans has been the vice chair of the US Chief Information Officers Council.
Evans holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's of business administration degree from West Virginia University.
Jamie Love, an open-source advocate at Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology, said he had made some progress persuading Forman -- Evans' predecessor -- to move toward open standards and open file formats inside the federal government.
Love hopes Evans will continue that trend. "I want her to require Microsoft or Microsoft's competitors to provide the government with software that saves documents in an open standards-based format," Love said. "The US government can legitimately make that a priority, to make the market more competitive and open."
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