Postal Service CIO to retire

Ellis Burgoyne, CIO for the U.S. Postal Service, announced internally this week that he will retire from USPS in early October.

A USPS spokesman confirmed Burgoyne's retirement to FCW.

Burgoyne served 35 years at the USPS, beginning his career as a letter carrier in Inglewood, Calif. He rose through the ranks, serving as postmaster of Oakland; manager of customer services in southern California; senior financial analyst in the former Southern Region and several other positions before becoming USPS' CIO and executive vice president in 2011.

Burgoyne's experience in various departments within USPS made him unique among that agency's IT leaders – according to one USPS official, Burgoyne was the only internal candidate to hold the CIO position. The experience served him well in overseeing technology and innovation in mail systems that deliver 170 billion pieces of mail to more than 150 million homes and businesses each year.

As CIO, Burgoyne's chief duties are directing the advancement of new mail intelligence, engineering systems, IT systems, payment technology and corporate information security.

While USPS is often associated with old-fashioned "snail mail," its technological capabilities are anything but outdated. Burgoyne oversees the third largest computing network in the world, one of the largest intranets, and a supercomputing network that runs real-time fraud analysis on 528 million mail pieces per day. Each piece of mail is logged, so law enforcement officials can retrace the path of mail if necessary.

Over the past year, the USPS has undertaken an agile approach to its IT investments, abandoning "waterfall" efforts that were too expensive and time-consuming for the agency to continue.

It is unclear how the USPS will fill the CIO position once it is vacated in October.