A new job for Darren Ash

Darren Ash is leaving the CIO job at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take up the top IT post at the Farm Service Agency at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ash will be leaving NRC in about two weeks, and starts at the USDA on March 6, according to his Feb. 17 email to colleagues announcing the move.

"I've had the distinct pleasure and honor of working for one of the best places to work in the Federal government for almost nine years," Ash wrote.  "In the time I have been here, I’ve come to appreciate that NRC is a very special, incredibly talented organization."

Ash joined the NRC in 2007. In a 2014 profile in FCW, he explained his centralized, holistic approach to managing technology inside a large organization.

"Where an organization can struggle is when different programs or projects are out on their own, without a connection," he said. "When organizations struggle, it's because something is thought of as an afterthought at the back end -- I'd rather deal with it at the front end."

Ash won Fed 100 honors in 2013, for his work with the American Council for Technology on behalf of the federal IT community. More recently, he has been co-leading efforts to develop an IT management maturity model to help agencies more effectively implement the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act.