With Oil Spill, DOI Quickly Hires CIO

The Interior Department, saddled with handling the Gulf Coast oil spill, on Wednesday quickly moved to appoint a new chief information officer, Bernard J. Mazer. He will replace Sanjeev Bhagowalia, who joined the General Services Administration on Monday.

Mazer, currently the CIO of Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service, will take office as department CIO on June 7.

"As a result of his leadership at the FWS, the delivery of IT resources continued to improve in spite of budgetary pressures and an ever-increasing workload," Andrew Jackson, deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services, said in a statement.

Since his appointment to the FWS CIO post in 2008, Mazer has enhanced oversight of the bureau's IT capital investments, according to department officials. He previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he was deputy director and chief of the information communications and technology team within the Economic Growth Agriculture and Trade Bureau.

Bhagowalia left Interior to fill a new tech position at GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications, the division that oversees public federal websites and helps agencies with public outreach. GSA recently created an IT shop within the office, renamed the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, and Bhagowalia will serve as its deputy associate administrator for innovative technology.

Hord Tipton, a former Interior CIO who now serves as executive director of (ISC)2, an information security certification organization, said he suspects that because Mazer is new, he will take a hands-on approach to handling an upcoming reorganization at the Minerals Management Service.

In response to the BP oil disaster, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on May 11 announced he would break up MMS into two divisions -- rendering inspection and enforcement independent of energy revenue collection.

The restructuring will be difficult for Mazer because, at present, the MMS CIO also is the chief financial officer.

"It's a very complicated situation. It's about to get more so right now," said Tipton, who worked at MMS before becoming CIO.

Each of Interior's eight bureaus has a CIO. "Getting them all to play on the same sheet of music is always tough," Tipton said, noting that, as a result, department CIOs usually leave after about a year.