Mr. Thomas N. Flagg joined the U. S. Department of Education as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in October 2024. In this position he oversees an Information Technology (IT) portfolio of $1B. As the CIO, Thomas serves as a principal advisor to the Under Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Secretary with respect to the astute use of IT to exceed the expectations of the Department’s customers. He serves as the day-to-day lead for coordinating and managing the various functions within the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), coordinates with and provides advice to the Department’s senior leadership regarding IT, information management, information assurance, and website activities management and operations.
He brings over two decades of business and information technology knowledge composed of both private sector and government experiences. Prior to joining the Department of Education, he served as the Director of Business Application Services (BAS) within the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). In this role, he led a team of three executives, and approximately 120 federal and 600+ contract staff in building and delivering business applications to the 26 DOL subcomponent mission agencies and the public. He also served as the Directorate of Information Technology Operations and Services (ITOS) “the right tools at the right time” inclusive of infrastructure, unified communications, and applications platforms in the cloud and DOL data centers to support the varied and diverse sub-agency missions DOL supports.
Prior to joining federal service in June 2013, Thomas worked as a small business consultant within ETA and has firsthand experience delivering systems as a web application programmer and project manager for the Office of Foreign Labor Certification, National Emergency Grants (now known as National Dislocation Worker Grants) and a multitude of other ETA systems. His additional work experiences in the private sector were as the Internet Services Manager at Recorded Books (the largest manufacturer of recorded audio), Lead Software Developer and Technology Manager of the InTouch patient medical records pharmacy system at Health Objects (a health services IT subsidiary of OmniCare—the largest institutional pharmacy at that time), the Manager and Technical Lead of the Insurance vertical at ZonaFinanciera.com (a Latin American financial services firm based in Fairfax, VA during the dot com era), GTE (prior to and during the Verizon Merger) and Intel Corporation as technical management contributor and trainee.
In his personal life, he was born and raised in the Washington DC area. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University (1998), and later received the Master in Business Administration and the Master in Business Management with a focus on Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business (2009). Thomas also holds numerous technical certifications.
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