Tony Scott added to board of Baldrige Foundation
Former U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott is taking his expertise to the private sector.
In April he’ll be joining the board of the foundation that supports the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, a public-private partnership with the National Institute for Standards and Technology that promotes a framework organizational performance management. Scott will sit on the Baldrige Foundation’s Board of Directors, the foundation announced Tuesday.
“We could not have added a more qualified member to our board as we seek to assist organizations facing the critical challenges in the cyber age,” said the foundation’s President and CEO Al Faber in a statement.
Faber said the former CIO was “instrumental” in developing and promoting the Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder. The draft questionnaire — released last year — is a tool for companies and other organizations to assess their cybersecurity “maturity.”
“I have spent many years dealing with issues of cybersecurity and the many forms cyber threats can assume,” Scott said in a statement. “I became convinced that the systems-level approach embodied in the Baldrige criteria provided the type of tool organizations of all size could use to align their cybersecurity efforts throughout their organization and maximize their levels of protection and response.”
While serving as federal CIO, Scott advocated for changing certain paradigms around cybersecurity, and for modernizing legacy federal IT systems to facilitate that and drive efficiencies and better service delivery.
Last year at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C., Scott said that “bubble wrapping” legacy systems with modern security tools in hopes that it will save some money in the short term is a recipe for disaster in the long run.
“In a world where every five years you can get double for every dollar you spend, if you’ve missed four or five of these upgrade cycles, you are spending five, six, 10 times more to keep old stuff going,” he said then. “There is not a good economic argument to this. Those that think they are saving money by not upgrading are deluding themselves.”
In the past, Scott has served as the chief information officer at VMware, Microsoft and The Walt Disney Company.
“Baldrige is developing unique tools to manage risk in the 21st Century,” Scott said in a statement. “I want to lend my knowledge to that ongoing effort.”
