Interview with Thomas Boyce, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Nuclear Regulatory Commission

This interview was taken at the December 2009 Government Technology Research Alliance (GTRA) Council Meeting.

Mr. Boyce is the Deputy Chief Information Officer, and Director, Office of Information Systems, at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In this position, he has oversight responsibilities of an IT program with an annual budget of over $60 million, and a government staff of nearly 200. Mr. Boyce began his career in private industry as a computer system engineer, and joined the government sector in 1986. Since that time he has held a series of information technology management positions in the federal government. (Source: 2009 Adobe Government Assembly)


Federal IT Group: Could you briefly describe some of the key challenges that your office is facing these days?

Thomas Boyce: One of the things we are working on actively right now is putting our desktop management contract up for recomplete: our entire infrastructure is currently outsourced, and that contract is up for renewal. Whoever gets it is going to be the key to how flexible and secure we are in accomplishing our mission and what infrastructure we employ to support that. This is probably the most important thing on my mind these days since I want our agency to move to a much more diverse environment as far as what we are providing to our employees is concerned, whether it is a desktop, a laptop, a thin client, or an operating system on a USB key – the goal is to allow them to move about securely and go back to the headquarters, as needed, to do their work.

Federal IT Group: What are the key capabilities that your office needs to acquire within the next few years in order to be able to deal with these challenges?

Thomas Boyce: We need to head in a very focused direction from managing a vast and diverse application portfolio (I still think, for example, there is a few rouge DB3 databases around) to 2-3 platforms that we would be supplying to the program offices. We have the necessary infrastructure in place, and this what applications should be built upon – the portfolio diversity that we currently have should not continue because it is not serving anyone well.

Federal IT Group: We noticed that you are an active LinkedIn user. What, if anything, do you find particularly useful about LinkedIn and other social networking tools in your line of work?

Thomas Boyce: You cannot know everything, and tools like LinkedIn have grown to the point where, if someone is involved with an issue that has been a peripheral interest of mine, he or she may be much more focused on that issue than I am, and I can really learn from what that person is doing. I could get messages, for instance, that there has been an update or a post on federated identity management at a university level, and I can then key in on that discussion since I would not necessarily have time to watch those sorts of things on my own.

Federal IT Group: What is your vision for social networks? Do you seem evolving into real pools of expertise that federal technology leaders can tap into as part of their day-to-day activities?

Thomas Boyce: I see how teenagers or kids in their twenties are working now – that is exactly what they are already doing when they get into the workplace, and the question remains as to whether older generations will be able to leverage that. The principal issues here are the openness and transparency [of the government] and learning from others instead of reinventing the wheel. I just came of the discussion on federal data standards (Note: The session titled “NIEM 100: Executive Overview of the NIEM Program”) and how you can do information exchange through a standards-based approach, which would be the key to the NRC accomplishing its mission more effectively. If I can learn more about that through social media or any other means, I will definitely try to do that.