WASHINGTON — Information technology company ServiceNow named Raj Iyer, the U.S. Army’s first civilian chief information officer, as its global head of public sector.

Iyer joins ServiceNow in the newly created position weeks after leaving the Army, where he sat atop the service’s IT sprawl and oversaw a $16 billion budget, which included hundreds of millions of dollars for cloud in fiscal 2023. The company announced the hire March 13.

“Raj is the best of the best,” ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement. “He’s the perfect leader to accelerate the mission critical nature of the work we do with governments around the world, to transform experiences for employees, service members, and citizens.”

Iyer in January said he would depart his military role after two and a half years, and return to industry. He previously worked at Deloitte, an international consulting firm.

In his new gig, Iyer will focus on digital transformation — a buzzy phrase often used to describe the embrace of new tech and the ditching of dated practices — across international markets, including in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.

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“We have a huge opportunity to truly transform the public sector through cloud-based digital technologies,” Iyer said in a statement. “ServiceNow has the biggest vision for digital transformation at the scale of government, and I’m thrilled to join a company that is equally as passionate and excited about the potential for change as ServiceNow.”

Iyer’s jump to industry precedes departures by two other Department of Defense IT czars.

The Navy’s Aaron Weis will leave his CIO post this month, and the Air Force’s Lauren Knausenberger will do the same in June. The timing of the respective exits, Knausenberger said at an event earlier this month, was not planned.

The two have not said where they are headed next.

Colin Demarest was a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covered military networks, cyber and IT. Colin had previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

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