Ex-Microsoft executive named to top US tech post

US President Barack Obama appointed a former Microsoft executive on Thursday as the new government technology chief.Steven VanRoekel, who worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2009, replaces Vivek Kundra, who is stepping down as federal chief information officer to take up a fellowship at Harvard University.As CIO, VanRoekel will direct policy and strategic planning for government information technology and will be responsible for the $80 billion in annual federal technology spending. At Microsoft, VanRoekel was an assistant to Bill Gates and the senior director of the US software giant's Windows Server and Tools Division.VanRoekel left Microsoft in 2009 to serve as managing director of the US Federal Communications Commission and moved to the US Agency for International Development earlier this year to serve as executive director of citizen and organizational engagement. Kundra, the US government's first CIO, was charged by Obama with improving performance and lowering the cost of government operations through the use of technology. Kundra has piloted a government move to greater reliance on Internet-based "cloud" computing and a number of other initiatives including a website called Data.gov, which provides unfiltered access to government data for use by the public, and another called IT Dashboard, which tracks IT spending.Obama relied heavily on the Internet during his presidential campaign for organizing, fundraising and communicating and has created MySpace, Facebook and Flickr pages and a Twitter feed since entering the White House.Jack Lew, director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, said in a blog post welcoming VanRoekel that information technology "is at the center of our efforts to save money, eliminate waste, and do more with less.""Steve is the right person to continue our efforts to make the government more efficient and more responsive to the America people," Lew said. "Under his leadership, I am confident that we will continue to build on the remarkable gains that we have made in changing the way the federal government manages IT."