Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer (CIO) at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is retiring from Federal service.
A USPTO spokesperson confirmed to MeriTalk that Aug. 6 is Holcombe’s last day at the agency. The spokesperson did not have an update on Holcombe’s successor.
Kelly Cox, the deputy director of the USPTO’s Enterprise Infrastructure Delivery Office, announced Holcombe’s retirement on Wednesday during the agency’s “USPTO Hour: IT and innovation” event hosted by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO).
“Today’s USPTO Hour is bittersweet for the OCIO family. This will be the last for charismatic CIO Jamie Holcombe, who is retiring from Federal service,” Cox said. “Jamie, we wish nothing but health, happiness, and prosperity on whatever you dive into next.”
“It has been our pleasure to serve beside you and implement your vision over the past [six] and a half years. Your energy, drive, and booming voice will be missed, but no doubt, will live on in the halls of USPTO for years to come,” she added. “From all of us at OCIO, thank you for your time and everything you have done for this organization.”
Holcombe first joined the USPTO as CIO in February 2019. During his tenure as CIO, Holcombe has overseen the agency’s transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic and its cloud modernization effort.
During today’s event, Holcombe said his biggest accomplishments as CIO are “the rapport and the team that we’ve built together with the understanding that the culture has changed into: ‘We can.’”
“We can do anything,” Holcombe said. “But when I first came on board, I was told, ‘Oh, we can’t do that. We can’t do this. We can’t do that.’ … I want to work alongside people that I can do things with. And yes, we can.”
“We got rid of all the mainframes. We are modernizing our equipment. We can move out to the cloud. We can replace things in three to five years. Don’t tell me we can’t. We can, and that’s the biggest thing we accomplished here is thinking differently about the Federal bureaucracy,” he said. “We’re in a time period right now where saying, ‘we can,’ is so important.”