Massachusetts appoints new CIO

Massachusetts has named a permanent chief information officer, who will be in charge of carrying out the state's OpenDocument policy.

The administration of Governor Mitt Romney said on Monday that it has appointed Louis Gutierrez as CIO. Gutierrez, who will to begin his new job on 6 February, replaces acting CIO Bethann Pepoli, who will become deputy CIO.

According to the press release announcing the change: "Gutierrez will be responsible for overseeing the final stages of implementation of the state's new OpenDocument format proposal, to go into effect in January 2007."

The appointment of Massachusetts technology managers has taken on international significance because of the state's decision last year to standardise its productivity applications on OpenDocument format.

The latest version of the state IT division's policy calls for all documents created by state executive branch agencies to be saved in the OpenDocument format in January of next year. Massachusetts chose OpenDocument because it is developed in a standards organisation rather than controlled by a single company, according to officials.

That decision has been contested by state politicians, leading to the resignation of Peter Quinn, the former CIO and one of the main architects of the plan.

The policy is also a potential blow to Microsoft, the dominant supplier of desktop applications, because Microsoft does not intend to natively support OpenDocument in Office 12, which is due for release in the second half of the year. State technology officials, however, have voiced their support for Microsoft's move to standardise Office 12 documents.

Gutierrez is currently the chief technology strategist at the Commonwealth Medicine Division of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Before taking that post, Gutierrez was CIO for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services where he spearheaded the creation of an online portal called Virtual Gateway, which integrated the websites of 16 agencies. He is a graduate of Harvard and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

In a statement, Gutierrez endorsed the state IT division's embrace of standards: "The Virtual Gateway is an example of how state government computing can be transformed through the application of open standards that interoperate with many kinds of technology and vendors."

A spokesman for Governor Romney said on Tuesday that "planning for the move to OpenDocument continues to be on track and [Gutierrez] will do what has to be done to move forward".

Romney will not run for re-election in Massachusetts and will step down at the end of this year. Because the CIO position is an executive branch appointment, the incoming governor next year could name a new CIO, Browne confirmed.

Martin LaMonica writes for CNET News.com