Nasa appoints 'innovation' CTO

Nasa has appointed the CIO of California's Ames research centre as a new agency-wide CTO in charge of 'leading IT innovation' across the space bureau, says The Register.

Chris C Kemp will be Nasa's first chief technology officer for IT. According to a Nasa statement, Kemp will be responsible for the agency's enterprise architecture division and for introducing new and emerging technologies into IT planning and implementation.

Kemp will formulate and oversee a new CTO Council with participants from Nasa's mission organisations and field centres. The council will foster creative ideas and nurture innovation within the agency's IT organisation.

Baseline Consulting has released the results of an international market survey designed to explore the link between data warehousing (DW) and master data management (MDM) initiatives, states Earth Times.

“Despite the close relationship between MDM and DW, a glance at even the most recent literature on these topics reveals these two important areas tend to be treated as entirely different,” said Andy Hayler, CEO of The Information Difference Company, which conducted the survey.

Key findings from the study show almost half (46%) of organisations surveyed have one or more DW and MDM implementations. Relatively few (7%) had only MDM. Encouragingly, 57% of MDM implementations are 'enterprise-wide'; for DW this number is 75%.

A delegation from the US is meeting with Russian officials to discuss a range of information technology-related topics such as Internet governance and cyber security, reports Federal Computer.

The discussions are part of a US-Russia ICT roundtable and bilateral talks with Russia's Ministry of Communications in Moscow, the state department said. The talks are the first US-Russia ICT roundtable since 2004, the department added.

Recently, senior state and commerce department officials have shown an increased focus on IT. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech on Internet freedom in January, and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke spoke in April about cyber security and online privacy.