Private, public, pumpkin spice: September in the C-suite

Leaves are changing, school is back in session, and the tech C-suite is hiring. Here’s how September shook out at the top of the industry.

DOT adds responsibility to Jack Albright’s plate

The days are never boring in the federal government’s IT space. For the Department of Transportation’s Jack Albright, that goes double, as he’s working two jobs now.

In addition to his work as deputy CIO, Albright is now acting chief digital and information officer at DOT, FedScoop reported on September 4 when the agency updated its information on his page.

In this new, combined role, he’ll head up “a team of highly skilled and energetic IT professionals that provide and maintain technology innovations and solutions to effectively, efficiently, and economically enable the Department’s lines of business,” according to his profile.

Albright has served as deputy CIO for DOT since December 2020; he’s been with the agency since 2015, starting as associate CIO for IT shared services. Before that, he spent nearly 10 years as CIO of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

But DOT has been a recurring theme: Albright worked there from 1992 to 1996 as an office assistant, and from 1998 to 2005 in IT roles in the Research and Special Programs Administration.

Grant Yacomeni joins Gigamon as CISO

Cloud security company Gigamon brought on Grant Yacomeni as CISO on September 2, a move aimed at strengthening AI hybridization in the tech stack.

Gigamon marks the first major private sector position for Yacomeni, whose career—save for a 10-month consulting stint at ICF—has been in the federal government. That experience helped sell his expertise.

Coming off an eight-year term at the Department of Defense, most recently as chief of the CISO staff, Yacomeni “spent his career operating in some of the world’s most demanding cybersecurity environments,” Gigamon CEO Gareth Maclachlan said in a statement announcing the hire.

AI researcher joins Ethyca as CSO

AI governance platform Ethyca turned to the academy for strategy, hiring Daniel J. Weitzner as CSO.

Weitzner has an extensive background in AI and machine learning. He was a research scientist at MIT from 1998 until this September, and served in the Obama administration from March 2011 to August 2012 as the deputy chief technology officer for internet policy.

Ethyca CEO Cillian Kieran said in a statement that he hopes that Weitzner can bring the expertise he developed on governance to the company, and use his understanding that “documentation-based compliance cannot survive contact with AI” to build out best practices.

As CSO, Weitzner will help head up how Ethyca deploys its new Astralis risk assessment tool.

“I’ve been excited by the research results on accountable systems we’ve achieved in the lab,” Weitzner said. “Now there is an urgent need to bring accountable systems to the marketplace through end-to-end governance technology like Astralis.”