I disagree. if you haven't heard of him, and he exists, it's probably because he's doing a good job and hasn't broken anything big enough to make the nightly news.
I work with big organizations doing big software development (one of the reasons I hang out here is that not only am I a startup junkie, there's something really weird that happens when you scale software development past 6 or 7 guys)
As part of that, I try to keep part of my head in government software development, which is like a world unto itself. I have worked with a couple of agency CIOs, so I've heard of the larger CIO structure that they are part of. There is a lot of CIO-type stuff that was started, ironically, by the Bush administration when they came in. Stuff like balanced scorecards and a national Enterprise Architecture group. As you can imagine, there's a huge push for security, but there are also some really wild System-of-Systems stuff going on. Drop me an email and I can hook you up with more resources if you are interested.
I use myself as an example of someone who should have heard of that position because I'm in the tech industry. How did you hear about that, btw?
That position needs to be much more front and center. Technology is only going to become more important. That should be recognized now.