Todd Park To Exit Federal CTO Role, Says Fortune

White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park plans to step down by the end of the year, but may take on another role as technology recruiter for the Obama administration, Fortune Magazine reported on its website Friday.

The White House has not officially confirmed the report.

According to Fortune, "He is expected to take on a new White House role, working from Silicon Valley to recruit tech talent into government roles. For example, he recently helped hire former Google executive Mikey Dickerson to help identify and fix government websites."

[Does Mikey Dickerson have the right stuff? Read US Digital Service: Key To Making Government Agile?]

Dickerson was one of the leaders of the technical team Park assembled to rescue the HealthCare.gov website, which performed poorly for the first few months after its launch in October 2013. Although Park got a share of the credit for restoring the health insurance website to health, he also got a share of the blame for the fact that it wasn't built right in the first place. He was one of the people called before Congress to explain the initial embarrassment of the technology behind President Barack Obama's signature legislation, informally known as Obamacare.

Previously a co-founder of the healthcare cloud and business services provider Athenahealth, Park joined the administration in 2009 as CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services. He often said that the title was a misnomer and that he was really more of an "entrepreneur in residence" trying to promote out-of-the box thinking and innovative use of technology at the agency. Park was associated with several open source, open data access, and API development initiatives at HHS and brought the same thinking with him when he came to the White House. In 2012, President Obama appointed him to replace the first White House CTO, Aneesh Chopra.

Like the White House CIO, the CTO role influences (but does not control) the adoption of technology throughout the government.

Park started Athenahealth in 1997 with business partner Jonathan Bush. The two had worked together as consultants to the healthcare industry at Booz Allen Hamilton. In 2008, he co-founded Castalight Health, a health information company that enables price and quality comparisons between providers.

Our new survey shows fed agencies focusing more on security, as they should, but they’re still behind the times with cloud and overall innovation. Get the new IT Priorities In Order? issue of InformationWeek Government today.