Guy Cavallo has been named permanent CIO at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) – removing the “Acting” portion of the title that he assumed at the agency in March, according to an internal OPM communication today.
He joined the OPM tech leadership ranks in September 2020 as Principal Deputy CIO. Current Federal CIO Clare Martorana had been OPM’s last official CIO before she left that post in March for her current duties.
Cavallo is well known in Federal IT circles as a vocal proponent of cloud service adoption by Federal agencies, and said earlier this year he was “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.”
The cloud-focused work is already well underway at OPM, Cavallo said earlier this month at MeriTalk’s virtual Cloud Cafe event. He said OPM was just finishing up a 90-day “sprint” geared toward further cloud service adoption, and laid out his strategy for five small teams to accomplish much of the work required in that effort.
“I have been lucky enough to lead the cloud effort at three separate agencies,” Cavallo said this month about his work at OPM, the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). “I am following the same model [at OPM], just fine-tuning it.”
His last several years of experience in Federal government CIO suites shows plenty of experience for pursuing cloud-centric goals.
Before coming to OPM in 2020, Cavallo spent nearly four years at SBA as the agency’s Deputy CIO, working with then CIO-Maria Roat to speed cloud adoption by the agency. In an interview last year as part of MeriTalk’s CIO Crossroads series, Cavallo and Roat detailed how that early-adopter work on cloud helped the agency weather the onslaught of new requirements brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, including administering the Paycheck Protection Program. Roat has since moved on to become Deputy Federal CIO.
Before coming to SBA, Cavallo was Executive Director, IT Operations at TSA, within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). From 2004 to 2013, he was a senior government strategist with Microsoft, with a focus on Federal, state, and local government.
