Maria Roat to Become New CIO for Small Business Administration

After serving a little more than two years as the chief technology officer at the Department of Transportation, Maria Roat has accepted the role of chief information officer at the Small Business Administration.

Roat confirmed the move to Nextgov Monday, and her final day at Transportation will be Sept. 30. Roat helped lead DOT’s cloud transition and data management practices and acted as an innovation agent for the agency. Before her time at DOT, she served as the FedRAMP director, overseeing the early stages of the government’s cloud computing standardization body.

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"Over the past several years Maria Roat has done an outstanding job as DOT CTO and as a critical member of my senior team," DOT CIO Richard McKinney emailed Nextgov. "Her accomplishments are many and will have a lasting impact at DOT.  It certainly is difficult anytime you lose someone of Maria’s caliber but at the same time I have known from the first day I met Maria that she was destined to someday lead an organization as CIO. I am grateful and consider myself fortunate to have had her on my team. So rather than just feel bad about losing her (and I most surely do), I am thrilled for her personally and for the greater federal CIO community that has added Maria to its ranks. I have no doubt that she will do an outstanding job at SBA. All of us at DOT thank Maria and are proud to see her off to her next great challenge."

Roat starts Oct. 3 and will replace Keith Bluestein, who had been SBA’s acting CIO. 

Sept. 27 update: This article has been updated with a statement from the Department of Transportation.