Baker Tapped for VA CIO?

It looks like the Obama administration is vetting long-time federal IT executive Roger Baker for the chief information officer post at the Veterans Affairs Department, according to sources.

Unlike some former VA CIOs, Baker would bring a lot of prior CIO experience to the job. Robert Howard, the VA CIO Bush appointed in 2006, was vice president and general manager of the analysis and learning technologies division at Cubic Corp. prior to joining VA in May 2005. Robert McFarland, who Bush nominated as VA CIO in 2003, was vice president of government relations at Austin, Texas-based Dell Computer and headed up business units for the computer maker.

Baker, on the other hand, served as CIO at General Dynamics Information Technology and worked as the CIO of the Commerce Department in the Clinton administration. Most recently, Baker was president and chief executive officer of Dataline Inc., an IT integrator based in Norfolk, Va.

If Baker were appointed, he would inherit a challenging IT environment at VA. The department has had some high profile security lapses and is working on an electronic health records system with the Defense Department, a project that was undertaken in response to the poor health care services that wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were received at Walter Reed. The latter IT effort would put Baker in the middle of one of President Barack Obama's key IT initiatives to develop a health network that would presumably reduce health care costs and medical errors.

On Jan. 27, Al Kamen, in his Washington Post column In the Loop, speculated Baker would be named chief innovation officer at VA, prompting federal IT executives to wonder exactly what that position could entail. But sources say Baker would fill the chief information officer position.

Baker declined to comment.