Latha Narayan, who has more than 24 years’ experience in the public and private IT sectors, is the new chief of FI$Cal’s Project Management Office, working within the IT Division. Narayan will oversee the planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and reporting of various system releases and projects for FI$Cal.
Narayan has served in several leadership roles for statewide IT projects and operations with the California Department of Technology (CDT) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). In addition to having a master’s degree in Information Systems Management, Narayan is credentialed as a Certified Project Management Professional and a Certified Organizational Change Management Practitioner.
FI$Cal also announced Thursday that Gerard Laygui is the new chief information security officer (CISO) for the department, also working in the IT Division.
Laygui is an IT veteran with more than 20 years’ leadership experience, mostly in the private sector. Most recently, Laygui was information security officer and privacy officer for the California Prison Industry Authority (CalPIA), aligning IT security measures with enterprise programs and business objectives. His responsibilities include evaluating CalPIA’s security posture using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework.
“As our CISO,” FI$Cal said in a statement, “Gerard will lead the expansion of security analytics practices, plan and implement security controls to continuously improve the security posture of the Department of FI$Cal, and manage the operations of security tools and technologies.”
Before entering state service in August 2018, Laygui spent almost 20 years with Hewlett-Packard, serving in various capacities as an engineer, consultant and tech lead. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Hawaii and an MBA from Sac State, and he also has numerous professional credentials.
