Tom Pyke

Commerce
Tom Pyke
Chief Information Officer

It began as a summer job at the then-Bureau of Standards. Just out of high school, Tom Pyke wrote the programming manual for a new computer that the agency, now the Commerce Department's National Institutes of Standards and Technology, was building for the National Weather Service. He got the job after receiving honors in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. "I liked it so much that I went back every summer," Pyke says.

From the University of Pennsylvania, he earned a Master of Science in engineering in computer systems as a Ford Foundation Fellow and went to work at NIST full-time in 1965. He's never left the department. "I've always been in Commerce, but I've had a number of different jobs," he says, including director for high-performance computing and communications at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Four years ago, he was named Commerce chief information officer.

When he started, Pyke says, information technology security was poor. "We gave it a very high priority," he says. "Now we have a good system. Each part has a plan that's been tested, and there are firewalls in place to protect our data."

What still needs to be improved, Pyke says, is the documentation that clearly shows the status of IT security for each system. Pyke says his job has become increasingly challenging as Commerce has moved from providing information such as Census and weather data to offering online transactions such as accepting applications for patents and licenses. "We've moved intensively in this direction over the past two to three years," Pyke says.

He's proud to note that Commerce's Web site is among the 70 most visited in the world, with 9 million to 10 million users monthly. And during weather emergencies like Hurricane Katrina, that number jumps even higher.