Baker Leaves VA With A Sharper Focus On IT

There are many federal information technology events that happen in Washington, D.C., but few are truly memorable. One of those was the morning of Oct. 8, 2009, when Roger Baker, the chief information officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs for just a few months at that point, took to the stage at an INPUT event in Tysons Corner to a standing room crowd of more than 700 industry executives just to see him talk.

It was Baker’s first public speech since returning to government (he was previously the deputy CIO at the Department of Commerce) and the federal IT community wanted to hear about PMAS – otherwise known as the Performance Management Accountability System – that was revolutionizing the way the federal government’s largest civilian agency was handling IT.

Baker used the platform to not only tell about the cost cutting measure, but also make jokes about the PMAS acronym, changing it into a variety of humorous puns that left the audience in stitches. It was revealed on Friday that Baker, one of the most respected CIOs in federal government, planned to resign in the coming weeks without mention of what his next plans will be. Baker will leave behind a legacy at VA and with other federal CIOs as a manager that used a data-driven review process to get the most from its information technology. His work was a precursor to White House projects like TechStat and PortfolioStat...