White House names new federal CIO

The White House has named Tony Scott, CIO and senior vice president at VMware, as U.S. chief information officer and administrator of the Office of EGovernment. Like his predecessor, Steven VanRoekel, Scott is an alum of Microsoft Corp.

Scott has been at VMware since August 2013. Before that, he served as CIO at Microsoft from 2008 to 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also previously was CIO at Walt Disney Co. and chief technology officer for General Motors.

Noting Scott’s "over 35 years of global leadership and management experience," OMB Director Shaun Donovan and Deputy Director for Management Beth Cobert wrote on the OMB blog that "under Tony’s leadership, we will continue to build on the remarkable work done by the nation’s first CIOs Vivek Kundra and Steve VanRoekel in changing the way the Federal government manages IT."

Deputy CIO Lisa Schlosser has been serving as acting CIO since September 2014, when VanRoekel left the post to return to the U.S. Agency for International Development as chief innovation officer and senior advisor to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, at the height of the West Africa Ebola crisis.