The move follows a six-year tenure as Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology chief technology officer, where he was tasked with guiding emerging technology such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.
“After several years with the state of Colorado, I’ve stepped away from my role as chief technology officer at OIT to return home to Oregon,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Pettit held that role from January 2020 until this month.
“Serving the people of Colorado during a time of intense modernization, audit remediation and innovation was both challenging and rewarding.”
In Oregon, he served as CIO from January 2014 to June 2018, and later as chief enterprise architect in the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office, according to LinkedIn. He will be responsible for modernizing legacy platforms and moving enterprise architecture forward in his new role.
Pettit’s IT leadership spans more than 25 years. His public-sector work includes his appointment as the first CIO of Oklahoma in 2010, before statewide IT services were consolidated under the Office of Management and Administrative Services. Under Pettit, the IT restructuring effort included bringing together about 80 data centers.
He holds a Ph.D. in computer and information sciences from the University of North Texas in Denton, where he spent 10 years as the city’s chief technology officer.
