Stacie Alboum joining FDIC as deputy director of enterprise strategy

After more than five years as the No. 2 in the National Institutes of Health’s lead IT office, Stacie Alboum is set to join the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. next month.

Alboum will take a role as deputy director of enterprise strategy in FDIC’s CIO Organization, she told FedScoop. Her first day is June 6.

In her new role, Alboum will be focused on leading the development of the financial agency’s IT strategic plan, which will be renewed in the near future, under CIO Sylvia Burns. FDIC last issued an IT strategic plan in 2019 for the 2020-2023 timeframe with core themes of effective communication, strategic focus, excellent service delivery and organizational engagement.

Alboum told FedScoop that a big part of her focus in developing the strategy will be “collaborating and partnering with IT and business leadership, leading customer engagement efforts, and assessing the CIOO’s demand and capacity management” to fulfill the needs of FDIC’s various divisions and business elements

She leaves NIH after working closely with CIO Andrea Norris in NIH’s Center for Information Technology on several modernization and expansion initiatives since joining in early 2017 — things like “modernizing our network, building out our supercomputing environment, moving to unified communications and collaboration,” Alboum said.

“What I realized when I came here is that the organization needed to really be more strategic. You know, we were great with the tactical response on the day-to-day. But we didn’t have a longer-term vision and strategy that we could drive some of these strategic initiatives to completion,” she said. “What I really took away from it is that we needed to do it in partnership and collaboration with the rest of the institutes and centers, and that really was what made the difference in our success.”

While Alboum acknowledged that the health and financial sectors are quite different in mission focus, she said she is returning to her roots with this move after studying economics and business while in college.

“Joining FDIC, an agency in the financial sector, is kind of bringing me back full circle to my education,” she said.

Alboum added: “It’s just an honor and a pleasure to join an agency that has such an incredible mission to maintain the stability and the public’s trust in the nation’s financial system. Health has been a wonderful mission to support. But I think the stability of the economy is equally as important.”