Pavan Pidugu, the new chief information officer (CIO) at the Department of Transportation (DoT), said on Thursday that his top priority is to build technology and to transform the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) into a one-stop technology shop.
Speaking at the Government Efficiency Summit in Washington on July 17, Pidugu – who stepped into the CIO role in February – said he realizes his job comes “with an expiration date” of January 2029. Therefore, he came prepared with “a goal list and a playbook day one on my job.”
“Goal number one is to build things,” Pidugu said. “We are in transportation. We build highways, we build trains, train tracks, we build transportation safety, we build bridges … so, we’re building all the things. Why not technology that we use?”
Pidugu previously served as the chief technology officer at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), an agency within DoT.
He said he already had an understanding of how the DoT OCIO operated, and he felt the CIO didn’t have a seat at the table when it came to business decisions.
“The CIO is not at the table or was not even informed or aware of certain things that were done in the departments in general,” Pidugu said. “I want to change that mindset.”
“I want the OCIO within DoT to be the technology shop, like we build technology, that’s the culture we want to create in-house,” he added. “We’re building applications, we’re building products, along with being everything else.”
Pidugu said his team had the DoT secretary sign a memo directing all of the administrators and the assistant and deputy assistant secretaries to say, “No more shadow IT in DoT, we’ll have one DoT IT.”
“That’s the way to do that if you want to actually be a central technology arm that actually does technology, right?” the CIO said. “In the process, we’re also uncovering a lot of redundant systems. We have a lot of duplicacies.”
For example, Pidugu said DoT has 10 to 14 grant systems. “We don’t even have 14 sub-agencies. I don’t know how we got 14 grant systems. So, unifying all of the grant systems into one common product across DoT is going to help us be able to have that visibility.”
“We’re trying to simplify that and give a one-stop shop product [so] if I’m supposed to do my job, all the capabilities that are required to do my job as a Federal employee are all in one place,” he said. “So, we’re looking at personas to look at what the interactions are between the department as well as the community and stakeholder groups, and we’re trying to give all of the capabilities in one-stop products.”