Gov. Jerry Brown has tapped California Department of Food and Agriculture agency information officer Robert Schmidt to become the chief of the Office of Technology Services at the Department of Technology.
Schmidt had been the agency CIO and director of Executive Office/IT Services at Food and Agriculture since 2011. In an interview with Techwire earlier this year, Schmidt detailed how his department was working to support projects such as location-based sensors on farms, computer-controlled drip irrigation and satellite imagery.
As the chief at OTech, one of Schmidt’s areas of involvement presumably will be CalCloud, which the state is attempting to reboot under a revamped strategy in order to increase participation among state entities and vendors. Under Schmidt’s leadership, Food and Agriculture was a CalCloud early adopter, moving the PiercesDisease.org website onto the cloud infrastructure. At the time, Schmidt said he was interested in moving bigger CDFA systems onto CalCloud.
"We want to test this [CalCloud] with other things. Anytime you have new technology — and I don’t care who’s supporting it — you need to test it out," Schmidt told Techwire in June.
According to the governor’s announcement Tuesday of Schmidt’s appointment, he was principal of statewide IT consolidation at the Department of Technology from 2009 to 2011 and a system software specialist at the California Franchise Tax Board from 1999 to 2009 and at the California Department of Technology from 1996 to 1999, where he was an associate system software specialist from 1995 to 1996.
Schmidt earned an MBA from California State University, Sacramento, and recently was studying innovation through a program at Stanford. He has taken the moniker of “Ambassador CIO” on Twitter and has 126,000 followers -- an unusually large number for a state servant.
At OTech, Schmidt will be replacing Davood Ghods, who retired in August after a year and a half in the position. The appointment requires Senate confirmation.
