Treasury's Thompson to join Unisys

Fred Thompson, former assistant director for consulting and marketing for the Treasury Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer, has joined Unisys Corp. as a director overseeing the company's e-government projects.

Thompson, who left Treasury in November 2002, will start his new position Feb. 20, said Bill Piatt, a partner in the federal government group at Unisys.

"Fred has deep understanding of both the spirit of the e-gov initiatives and the nuts and bolts of the interagency issues that must be addressed in order to ensure their success," Piatt said.

Unisys is working on several of the 24 cross-agency e-government initiatives, although Piatt decline to identify which ones.

He said he is not concerned about Congress' appropriating only $5 million of a $45 million budget request for the initiatives for 2003. Mark Forman, associate director for IT and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget, will deal with financial issues, Piatt said.

"There's so much redundant funding. I'm personally confident in Mark's ability to invoke Clinger-Cohen [Act of 1996] to find the necessary funding," he said. The act set the stage to reform federal information technology management and establish CIOs at federal agencies.