Hired as the city’s chief digital officer in March, Lillian Buie is out at the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology.
After Technically Baltimore contacted her via e-mail last week, the following automatic reply came from Buie’s office: “Effective July 13th, I am resigning from my position as Director of Digital Communications and Marketing with the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology.”
Buie, who was hired as a chief digital officer shortly after the resignation of chief information officer Rico Singleton in March, left some in Baltimore’s tech community scratching their heads. Singleton, who before arriving in Baltimore worked as deputy chief for New York’s Office of Technology, was forced to resign after an audit by New York State found he had arranged a job for his girlfriend at McAfee and “pressured the software security company McAfee for a job … after he negotiated a multi-million dollar contract with the company,” reported the Baltimore Brew in February.
Buie did not immediately return a request for comment.
According to an article published by the Baltimore Brew on March 2, “after a search process that Singleton touted publicly, he gave the [chief digital officer] job to Lillian Buie, a woman from the D.C. area who has puzzled the network-minded local tech crowd by staying largely in the background.”
Buie’s official title, still listed on her LinkedIn page, was director of digital communications and marketing at MOIT.
Her resignation comes one week after the city’s hiring of Chris Tonjes, formerly the chief information officer for Washington, D.C.’s public library system, as Baltimore’s new chief technology officer.
Phone calls and e-mails placed this week by Technically Baltimore with MOIT have yet to be returned.
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