Nitin Pradhan ( mr, नितिन प्रधान;) was the Departmental Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the

US Department of Transportation The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT or DOT) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is headed by the secretary of transportation, who reports directly to the President of the United States and ...

(DOT) as part of the

Obama Administration Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. A Democrat from Illinois, Obama took office following a decisive victory over Republican ...

from July 6, 2009 to August 31, 2012. After leaving US DOT, Pradhan established and led the nation's first Federal Technology Accelerator and Partner Consortium called Public Private Innovations and later cofounded GOVonomy, an emerging products technology marketplace for the public sector as well as ScaleUP USA, a Digital Business Growth Accelerator. Prior to joining DOT, Pradhan was an IT Executive at Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), the 12th largest school district in the USA. Earlier, Pradhan was the Managing Director of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology (CIT). He was also the co-founder and former CEO of a wireless startup.

Early life and education

Born and brought up in

Pune Pune (; ; also known as Poona, (List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million ...

, India, Pradhan attended

Loyola High School (Pune) Loyola High School and Junior College is a private Catholic primary and secondary school located in Pashan, Pune, India. Founded by the Jesuits in 1961, the school provides a single-sex education for boys only from K to Grade X; and a co-educa ...

. After high school, Pradhan attended the Faculty of Technology and Engineering,

Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, formerly Baroda College, is a public university in the city of Vadodara, in Gujarat state, India. Originally established as a college in 1881, it became a university in 1949 after the independence of ...

(MSU), India where he completed his bachelor's degree in engineering. He followed this degree with master's in marketing management from

Institute of Management Development and Research, Pune The Institute of Management Development and Research (IMDR) in Pune, India, is the oldest management institution in Pune, and comes under the Deccan Education Society. Earlier IMDR was offering three full-time programmes: Post Graduate Diploma in ...

, India. Pradhan came to

Washington, DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...

on a graduate fellowship from the Kogod School of Business at The

American University The American University (AU or American) is a private federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Its main campus spans 90 acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, mostly in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Northwest D.C. AU was charte ...

(AU), to study for his second master's degree in accounting.

IT philosophy

Pradhan’s IT philosophy focuses on people first, innovation, agility and driving business value. He believes that technology is first about people. Technology based Innovation is his second theme. He believes that chief information officers (CIOs) have a dual role to play as chief innovation officers. This aspect focuses on creating an innovation life cycle within organizations consisting of ideation and crowd sourcing tools like DOT’s IdeaHub, a process for selection of best ideas, a cloud based agility platform for quick deployment of “apps” that drive business value, an Amazon.com-like IT business catalogue, with a one-stop shop for basic, premium, and fee-for-service IT offerings, and an IT Vital Signs dashboard that measures progress. Finally, he has promoted the concept of new IT—IT 2.0, as he calls it, is based on immediately providing significant

public value Public value describes the value that an organization or activity contributes to society. The term was originally coined by Harvard professor Mark H. Moore who saw it as the equivalent of shareholder value in public management. Public value is supp ...

and business value, and Everything as a Service (EAAS). He is a strong proponent of using technology to deliver business results, for example; using emerging innovations like Intelligent Transportation Systems and DOT’s Connected Vehicles Program designed to leverage

vehicle-to-vehicle Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are created by applying the principles of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) – the spontaneous creation of a wireless network of mobile devices – to the domain of vehicles. VANETs were first mentioned and introd ...

(V2V), driverless cars, and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless communication in order to make driving safer by making cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles aware of the vehicles around them, even if the drivers aren't."Dataquest CIO Handbook 2012, Dataquest Magazine Interview"
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Career

Pre Obama Administration Career

Pradhan also supported initiatives launched in the DC metro region in the mid-nineties; including Potomac Knowledge Way and Netpreneur,"Netpreneur Exchange – Internet Entrepreneurship in Greater Washington DC (archived site)"
/ref> established by the Morino Institute, and the creation and expansion of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) a membership and trade association for the technology community in Northern Virginia, now the largest technology council in the nation, currently serving about 1,000 organizations. After CIT, Pradhan co-founded a wireless startup and was the CEO in early 2000.

Obama Administration Career

In 2009, Pradhan joined DOT as its CIO. Pradhan was the chief advisor to the

Secretary of Transportation A secretary, administrative professional, administrative assistant, executive assistant, administrative officer, administrative support specialist, clerk, military assistant, management assistant, office secretary, or personal assistant is a wh ...

Ray LaHood Raymond H. LaHood (born December 6, 1945) is an American politician who served as the 16th United States Secretary of Transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the I ...

relating to information technology. In his role as the Departmental CIO, Pradhan provided IT vision, strategy, planning and oversight for DOT's more than $3.0 billion IT portfolio, the 6th largest in the Federal Government. Pradhan's focus at DOT was on using technology to drive mission and business value, IT portfolio optimization, streamlining technology services, creating an IT business catalogue and Online distribution(app store), holistic cyber security and

public private partnership In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...

s like the Digital Transportation Ecosystem (DTE). Some of the DOT technology initiatives included: *Modernization of the National Airspace System (NAS)- Called NextGEN, which upgrades the system from older ground-based radars to satellite and GPS based systems. *Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)- A Connected Vehicles Program that improves vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure safety via wireless communications and threat alerts. *Modernizing Analog 911 Systems (E911)- Next generation digital VOIP 911 systems capable of receiving and sending internet protocol based voice, video and text.

Post Obama Administration Career

In September 2012, Pradhan established the nation’s first Federal Technology Accelerator and Partner Consortium called Public Private Innovations (PPI). The goal of PPI is to drive public value through private growth by researching and analyzing government problems and matching them with business technology solutions; nurturing, adapting, and deploying technology platforms, products, and services for the federal marketplace and starting, building and growing government practices for new or existing IT contractors and technology suppliers. In, March 2013, Pradhan cofounded GOVonomy.com, an emerging products technology marketplace focused on the public sector.

Professional recognition

For his work at the Department of Transportation, Pradhan and the DOT were awarded: * InformationWeek's 500 IT Innovators Awards in 2010 * the "Premier 100" award by

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

magazine in 2011 * the "Government "CIO 50"award from InformationWeek in 2011 * the "CIO 100" award by CIO magazine in 2012, * and the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...

"Open Government Leading Practices Awards" in 2012.

References

External links

archived Profile as DOT CIO
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pradhan, Nitin United States Department of Transportation officials Living people Obama administration personnel Technology evangelists American politicians of Indian descent Chief information officers Kogod School of Business alumni American people of Marathi descent American technology chief executives Year of birth missing (living people)