Christine Rider (formerly Liu) has served as the CIO at SBA since April 24, 2006. She has taken major steps in revitalizing and institutionalizing the OCIO office to follow a new business operating model in delivering high-quality, customer-focused IT support and services to the SBA enterprise, with a footprint of 100+ field offices, working side by side strategically with the business program offices in promoting innovations to better meet their mission objectives A member of the Senior Executive Service since 2000, she has 29 years of federal service and is the recipient of the 2005 Presidential Meritorious Rank Award for the work she has done at Dept of State.

Prior to becoming CIO at SBA, she served as Deputy CIO and Chief Knowledge Officer at State Dept. She was involved in major initiatives in support of the Dept of State Secretary’s vision toward Transformational Diplomacy. She directed the development of the Joint State/USAID IT Strategic Plan, Enterprise Architecture, President’s e-Gov PMA, and the Department’s IT investment portfolio. As CKO, she provided strategic direction, advocacy, guidance and support on knowledge management initiatives within State, and between State, foreign affairs partners and other USG agencies.

From 1999 to 2005, she was Director of the Systems Integration Office, Bureau of Information Resource Management, Dept of State. In this role, she provided policy direction, budget formulation, strategic and tactical planning, and implementation guidance on major modernization initiatives: State’s mainframe data centers and “server farm” operation centers; network infrastructure; enhanced backup contingency planning and implementation; corporate applications software design and implementation for worldwide use; application systems integration; corporate data base systems administration; data standardization and integration. She pioneered the establishment of consolidated “server farms” in 2000, referred to as ”Enterprise Server Operations Centers” to provide 7x24 centralized operations and management of client-server, and web-based system platforms for the Dept of State.

From 1987 to 1998, she held various IT project management positions at the Dept of State Dept in the areas of telecommunications and mainframes. From 1989 to 1992, she led the task force responsible for planning and standing up a major Data Center to serve as a the contingency backup and co-processing center for State’s primary data center. She started her federal career as a computer programmer with the Department of Energy in 1979, and worked at USDA for 6 years as a systems analyst and project manager.

Christine received her B.S. in Chemistry from American University in 1974, and her M.S. in Computer Systems from the University of Maryland in 1998. She completed the Advanced Management Program at IRM College, National Defense University in 1994. She served as the Program Committee Chair for the Executive Women in Government (EWG) organization in 2005, and on the GITEC Board and Executive Advisory Committee in 2006/2007. She is currently serving as Co-Chair for the Federal CIO Council IT Workforce Committee. An active member of the ACT/IAC organization, she is a mentor at heart, and was an active executive mentor with State Dept’s Civil Service Mentoring Program. In her spare time, she enjoys gardening, landscaping, kayaking and classical piano playing. She recently expanded her family of 2 children with 3 new stepsons, a step-daughter-inlaw and 4 step-grandchildren as of Nov.’08.