Mayor Adrian Fenty on Tuesday nominated a California software guru to run the District’s technology office, an agency marred this year by a bribery and kickback scandal. Bryan Sivak, Fenty said, has 15 years of experience building software and Internet technologies and “developing business practices.” Pending D.C. Council approval, Sivak would manage a $43 million budget and about 240 employees, oversee the District’s Web presence at dc.gov and grow the D.C. One Card program — the city’s fledgling identification system. Interim CTO Chris Willey steps aside with Sivak’s appointment. Willey filled in for Vivek Kundra, who left in March to become President Obama’s chief information officer. Days after Kundra left his D.C. job, federal investigators busted a bribery ring involving high-level OCTO employees and the agency’s contractors. Kundra was never implicated. “One of the things I would like to understand is what has been done to prevent something like this from happening again,” Sivak said. Five people, including three OCTO employees, have been charged so far in the scandal, and 23 people fired.
Sushil Bansal, owned of Advanced Integrated Technologies, and Yusuf Acar, the city’s former top computer security official, were charged in March with wire fraud and conspiring to commit bribery and launder money. Law enforcement officials said Acar, 40, steered millions of dollars’ worth of government contracts to Bansal and received kickbacks for hiring “ghost employees.”
The city’s chief technology officer, Fenty said, must be an “elastic, accountable, outside-the-box thinker.” Sivak, 34, described himself as an “more of an innovator than anything else.” Sivak founded InQuira Inc., a Silicon Valley software firm. He has lived in London since 2005. “I’m hoping that this candidate has both the vision thing but also the managerial ability,” said Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who has oversight of OCTO and met with Sivak on Tuesday. “They have a complex portfolio, so somebody has to get the thing under control.”
