2011 WCO IT Conference and Exhibition


Title
Chief Information Officer
Company

Bio
Richard A. Spires was appointed in September 2009 to serve as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He is responsible for the department’s $6.8 billion investment in Information Technology (IT). He leads and facilitates portfolio management, development, implementation, and maintenance of the department’s IT architecture. Mr. Spires is the chairman of the DHS Chief Information Officer Council and the Enterprise Architecture Board.

Mr. Spires serves on the Federal CIO Council, where he was selected vice chairman by its members in January 2011. He also serves as co-chair of the council’s Federal Data Center Consolidation Task Force and previously co-chaired the Management Best Practices Committee.

Mr. Spires held several positions at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from 2004 through 2008. He served as the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support, having overall responsibility for the key support and administrative functions for the IRS, including IT, Human Capital, Finance, Shared Services, Real Estate, and Security functions. Before becoming Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Spires served as CIO of the IRS, with overall strategic and operational responsibility for a $2 billion budget and a 7,000-person Modernization and Information Technology Services organization, being accountable for maintaining more than 400 systems administering in excess of 200 million taxpayer records and supporting more than 100,000 IRS employees. Mr. Spires served for two and half years as the Associate CIO for Applications Development and led the IRS’s Business Systems Modernization program, one of the largest and most complex information technology modernization efforts undertaken to date.

From 2000 through 2003, Mr. Spires served as President, Chief Operating Officer, and Director of Mantas, Inc., a software company that provides business intelligence solutions to the financial services industry. In helping to establish Mantas, Mr. Spires successfully led efforts to raise $29 million in venture funding. Before Mantas, Mr. Spires spent more than 16 years serving in a number of technical and managerial positions at SRA International.

Mr. Spires received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Cincinnati. He also holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the George Washington University. Mr. Spires was named Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering in 2006.