Holcomb detailed to Homeland

Lee Holcomb is on detail as the director of infostructure at the Office of Homeland Security and will be working on interoperability and enterprise architecture issues.

Holcomb, who has been the CIO at NASA for nearly five years, will report to Steve Cooper, senior director of information integration and chief information officer at the Homeland Security Office.

The assignment comes about as Congress debates how to shape the department and as an interagency board hashes out its integrated information technology infrastructure.

The Office of Management and Budget last week froze more than $1 billion in IT projects at major agencies slated to join the organization.

The freeze, detailed in a July 19 memo, affects planned investments of more than $500,000 at the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies.

Following reviews, the board will recommend reductions and consolidations in IT spending. Because NASA isn't part of the mix, Holcomb doesn't have ties to the systems at stake.

Further, he is co-chairman of the CIO Council's federal architecture and infrastructure committee and a longtime champion of centralization efforts.

Before becoming NASA's CIO, Holcomb was a senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Paul Strassmann is now acting CIO at the space agency. Strassmann began work May 1 as a senior IT adviser to NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, assessing information management operations, helping develop and implement an agencywide vision for IT, and collaborating on the delivery of an integrated financial management system.