White House poaches 'IT-as-a-service' advocate Tony Scott from VMware to be US CIO

Scott told Computing in December that he had radically changed the way the virtualisation giant worked

US president Barack Obama has announced that the White House has hired VMware CIO Tony Scott as the new United States CIO.

Computing interviewed Scott in December, when he revealed that he was changing the way that the virtualisation giant worked, having deployed an "IT-as-a-service model".

"It means that anything new I want to do shows up as a new service. I think it will allow for more of a rapid adoption of new technologies compared to the old traditional hardware siloed model," he said at the time.

According to a White House statement, Scott will drive the administration's Smarter IT Delivery Agenda as well as handling the administration's other core objectives, such as protecting federal IT assets and information and driving value in federal IT investments.

Scott, who was previously CIO at Microsoft and before that at The Walt Disney Company, will take over the role which was first given to Vivek Kundra, and then Steve VanRoekel.

"With the radical evolution of IT, the federal government has unprecedented opportunity to enhance how we deliver services to the American people and spark greater innovation in the digital age," the White House statement reads.

It adds that over the past six years, the administration has attempted to improve the way government delivers results and technology services to the public.

It claims that it had adopted "game-changing technologies" such as cloud solutions, and has optimised IT investments to save US taxpayers nearly $3bn.

In his recent interview with Computing, Scott said that there was initially a lot of scepticism about IT-as-a-service because each division at VMware had been set up using the old model of procuring hardware.

"You can imagine what happens when you say ‘all right, we're going to flip this model and pre-buy a bunch of hardware, not knowing exactly what we're going to use it for, we're going to rack it, stack it and make it available - and it becomes a ‘build it and they will come model'," he explained.

Scott also blamed a level of attrition in the overall IT workforce on a whole generation of tech staff who are readying themselves for retirement.

"These are folks who were there in the early days with deep technical skills, but as technology has moved along, some of those skills have been glossed over by business management tools, and through layers of software," he said.

"But that core set of skills is retiring and leaving the workforce and is not being replaced at the same rate, which is giving the industry a problem," he added.

It will be interesting to see if Scott attempts to push the same IT-as-a-service model within the US government, and how he deals with recruitment at the White House.