At long last, I’m back to my blog.   

While I was on vacation, the big news (in case you haven’t already heard about it) was that Massachusetts’ embattled CIO Peter Quinn handed in his resignation.  Quinn became a lightning rod for controversy when he announced in September 2005 official plans to require all documents created by the state’s executive branch to be stored in an open format, as opposed to Microsoft Word or some other proprietary file format, beginning in 2007.  About two months later, the state began investigating whether trips Quinn made to technology conferences violated state travel procedures, according to a story in The Boston Globe, which spurred the inquiry.  Although Quinn was vindicated, he apparently had had enough of the controversy surrounding him. 

In other personnel news, online movie tickets provider Fandango promoted its vice president of operations, Rick Butler, to CIO just a few days before the close of 2005. Butler reports to Fandango’s president and CEO Art Levitt.  In his new post, Butler is responsible for relations with exhibitors, day-to-day IT operations and infrastructure, web site engineering, and theater and customer support.  Prior to Fandango, he was senior vice president of operations for the FinancialPrinter.com business unit of Conscium Inc. and regional vice president for Bowne Business Solutions.

Bill Johnson was promoted to vice president of information technology at Intergraph. He most recently was in charge of corporate IT and directed IT for Intergraph’s security, government and infrastructure business unit.  Previously, he was executive manager of IT at an Intergraph business unit for seven years.  Johnson has worked for Intergraph for 15 years.