Guy Cavallo, who joined the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) last September as Principal Deputy CIO, has been named the agency’s acting CIO effective today.
The appointment of Cavallo – who brings with him considerable top-level Federal agency IT management experience – follows President Biden’s appointment on March 9 of OPM CIO Clare Martorana as the new Federal CIO and administrator of the Office of Electronic Government at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Cavallo has been a vocal champion of Federal agency use of cloud services in testimony before Congress and at government technology events. He indicated in a statement to MeriTalk that his focus on digital transformation and cloud adoption will remain a prominent theme as the new IT leader at OPM.
“It is a great honor to be selected as OPM’s Acting CIO,” Cavallo said. “As Acting CIO I am committed to building on recent progress in OPM’s digital transformation with a focus on the transition to the cloud and the delivery of enterprise IT services.”
Before joining OPM last year, Cavallo was Deputy CIO at the Small Business Administration (SBA). Over a nearly four-year span at SBA working with then-CIO Maria Roat, SBA worked to accelerate adoption of cloud services and benefited from that effort as demands on the agency increased dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a riveting account as part of MeriTalk’s CIO Crossroads interview series about Federal agency CIOs and their IT operations in the pandemic, Cavallo and Roat detailed SBA’s whirlwind experience with enabling the Paycheck Protection Program, dealing with a 100-fold increase in web traffic, and standing up security efforts to defeat fraudsters.
Roat moved on from SBA last year to become Deputy Federal CIO and is finishing up a two-month stint as Acting Federal CIO that preceded this week’s appointment of Martorana as the new Federal CIO.
Prior to his tenure at SBA, Cavallo was Executive Director, IT Operations at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Before that, he was a senior government strategist with Microsoft from 2004 to 2013, with a focus on Federal, state, and local government.
