Bush veteran tapped as tech trade group president

Phillip Bond, a former technology policy advisor in U.S. President George Bush's administration, will be the new president and chief executive officer of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade group actively involved in pushing tech issues in Washington.

Bond, undersecretary for technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce from 2001 to 2005, will take leadership of ITAA in August, the trade group said Monday. Bond replaces Harris Miller, who resigned from ITAA in January to run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia but lost in the Democratic primary earlier this month. Robert Laurence, a vice president with Sybase Inc., has served as interim ITAA president.

The ITAA job will allow him to focus both on U.S. tech issues and international ones, in a private sector role, Bond said. "I had always envisioned this kind of role," he said.

A top priority for Bond, currently senior vice president for government relations at Internet job search firm Monster Worldwide Inc., will be to push U.S. innovation through ITAA, he said.

"For me, the operating principle is the Information Technology Association of America ought to be focused on America being the innovation leader of the world," Bond said. "IT is the enabling common denominator for innovation."

Pushing innovation will mean the ITAA continuing to focus on the quality of the U.S. education system, immigration programs, patent law reform and a research and development tax credit, Bond said.

When Miller left ITAA, there was some speculation about possible mergers with other tech-focused trade groups. Dozens of trade groups push various technology issues in Washington, but Bond said consolidation isn't in the immediate future.

With the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bond met regularly with the leaders of Washington-based tech trade groups, and he plans to use those connections to work with other groups when they have a common agenda with ITAA, he said.

"I will focus on making ITAA as big and strong a voice as I can," he said.

Bond has served as director of federal public policy at Hewlett-Packard Co. Between 1998 and 2001, he was senior vice president for government affairs and treasurer at the Information Technology Industry Council, another tech trade group. He has also worked as chief of staff for former U.S. Representative Jennifer Dunn, a Republican from Washington state, and he served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the U.S. Department of Defense.