The Market for Executives

Despite increased demand for high-caliber leadership in all segments of the technology community, it wasn't until fairly recently that we saw the migration of top information technology executives between the federal and corporate sectors. Hank Philcox went from the Internal Revenue Service to become chief information officer at DynCorp, and Renny DiPentima moved from the Social Security Administration to SRA International Inc., where he became president of SRA Federal. It has quickly become clear that federal IT leadership experience laid the foundation for their success. As far back as the late 1970s, there were some non-political appointments into federal IT leadership roles. And in the late 1980s, Janet Barnes moved from MCI to become the first designated federal CIO at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. In recent years, more high-profile federal positions have been filled from outside government, with candidates coming from such companies as Oracle Corp. and FedEx Corp. Although critics complain that the average tenure of these federal appointees is only two years, the reality is that the tenure of private-sector CIOs is no different. Federal agencies now commonly utilize DiggThis | Furl David Tittle, a veteran of over three decades in the executive search industry, is a co-founder of Paul-Tittle Search Group,