Former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel will become the next chief information officer for the federal government, the White House announced today.

VanRoekel, 41, worked at Microsoft for 15 years—including a stint as Bill Gates’ assistant—before joining the Obama administration in 2009 as managing director of the Federal Communications Commission. He will succeed Vivek Kundra, who was the first CIO in U.S. history, appointed by President Obama on March 5, 2009.

Kundra, 36, had led the effort to overhaul the government’s approach to technology for more than two years—the federal government spends about $80 billion every year on information technology, more than any other corporation. Kundra is headed to Harvard to take a joint appointment at the Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the law school.

Under Kundra, the government agencies have been adopting new technologies that improve efficiency and save money for the government’s many technology projects.

“We’re trying to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government,” VanRoekel says.

VanRockel says he plans to move ahead of the work Kundra began, including reducing the number of computers and data centers, shifting over to cloud computing, and making all kinds of government data accessible to the public by putting it on the Web, such as economic, health care, and environmental information.

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