DHS CIO Departs After Long Leave of Absence
In goodbye message, Richard Spires acknowledges long tenure at the department. says he will miss colleagues.
Richard Spires, the Homeland Security Department’s chief information officer, who had been on indefinite leave since March, stepped down on Tuesday, a DHS official said.
The official said the department has accepted his resignation and Deputy CIO Margie Graves, who had been filling in for Spires as acting CIO, will continue serving in that capacity. The reason for Spires’ temporary departure and ultimate resignation were not made public.
FCW published an email Spires sent to various DHS staff, stating, “It has been a privilege to work with such a stellar group of public servants to support such important missions. I have served as the Department’s CIO for more than 3 1/2 years, and I take pride in working with you to have IT more effectively support the Homeland Security missions and business as we also have worked to more efficiently deliver our services. I have learned much from you and I will miss you.”
Having overseen DHS’s $6.4 billion computing purse since early in the first Obama administration, Spires was a relative stalwart in a field that has a high churn rate. He helped steer various governmentwide information technology programs as vice chairman of the Federal CIO Council and co-chair of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.