Thomas P. Hughes

September 15, 2005

By Alina Tugend

Social Security Administration
Thomas P. Hughes
Chief Information Officer

It was after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that Thomas P. Hughes decided he wanted to make a contribution by moving out of the private sector and into public service. So, in 2002, he joined the Social Security Administration as chief information officer.

It wasn't his first foray into government work. From 1986 to 1994, he served in the elected post of state district court clerk in Texas. He helped reengineer the technology system to manage a $50 million budget and 50,000 pending court cases. From there, Hughes moved into private business. He was vice president of OCS Technologies in Cleveland, managed his own consulting firm and served as a senior consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In some ways, his role hasn't changed that much. "We struggle in both government and business not to just throw money and technology at a business problem, but to integrate the business with technology," Hughes says. But unlike business, he says, government has to make decisions based on "different value judgments. It has to give significant considerations to policies when making technological changes. In business, it's the bottom line."

His No. 1 concern, as for most CIOs, is security. "That includes disaster recovery, continuity of operation and maintaining integrity of the data," he notes. There's never any resting on one's laurels, because "You're only as good as, 'No one's broken in today,' " Hughes says. Most recently, SSA dropped from the top green score to the middle yellow score for e-government in the latest quarterly score card on the President's Management Agenda. Hughes attributes that to a conflict with the Office of Management and Budget on "the way we report certain projects," but declined to elaborate. He points out, however, that his agency scored well in the security area.

Hughes earned a master's at the University of Dallas and a master's in public administration at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.