Pyke to take over as Energy CIO

Rose Parkes, a 35-year veteran of government who currently serves as the Energy Department’s chief information officer, announced her retirement this morning. Commerce Department CIO Tom Pyke will take over her post.

A DOE spokeswoman confirmed that Parkes will retire Jan. 3, 2006.

Parkes has been DOE’s CIO since October 2003, a position in which she oversees a $2.8 billion information technology portfolio. Before that, she was CIO at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she also served as deputy CIO and deputy assistant director of the IT Services Directorate.

Earlier in her career, she was CIO at the Defense Commissary Agency where she oversaw IT plans, policy and budget issues.

A native of Santa Fe, N.M., Parkes began her career in government in 1970 as an intern working for the Army and the Defense Department.

In a message to CIOs at Commerce that Federal Computer Week obtained, Pyke wrote that he has accepted the CIO job at Energy.

"After 45 years here at the Department of Commerce, including the last four years as Commerce CIO, I have accepted an offer to take on a new challenge, as CIO of the Department of Energy," he wrote. "I will be leaving to go to Energy on Nov. 27."

At Commerce, Pyke began his career at the National Bureau of Standards, which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as a student trainee in 1960. He later became director of the bureau’s Center for Computer Systems Engineering and then headed its Center for Programming Science and Technology.

In 1986, he became assistant administrator for satellite and information services at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and then its director of high-performance computing and communications. He eventually became NOAA’s first CIO before moving on to become Commerce’s CIO, responsible for a $1.5 billion annual IT budget.