Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page 38)

Two Potential Nominees? With that in mind, two names in the rumor mill stand out: Vivek Kundra, CTO of Washington, D.C., and Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist. Kundra has said publicly he is advising Obama’s transition team. And Cerf is on Obama’s shortlist of potential CTOs, according to a recent Business Week magazine report. Both men have talked extensively with Government Technology over the past 18 months. And both could bring valuable skills and experience to the post. In less than two years, 33-year-old Kundra has established himself as one of government’s most forward-thinking CIOs. He’s drawn widespread attention for adopting hosted applications and applying low-cost Web 2.0 tools to government tasks. “Look at what we did with our most recent procurement around project management,” Kundra said in an April 2008 interview. “We decided to go with the cloud model instead of buying a ton of servers that would have taken six or seven months to procure, configure and deploy. We were able to do that immediately. When we look at the platform in terms of collaboration, everything is going to be in the cloud. And as we look at the whole data center model, the question really becomes, one, why do we need a data center? And, two, what are such critical applications that they must be hosted within the government eternally?” Earlier this year, the District of Columbia signed a contract with Google that will provide the company’s Internet-based e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications to all 38,000 district employees. As part of a broad city government transparency initiative, Kundra developed and published performance metrics for city agencies and experimented with posting YouTube videos of procurement conferences. He also created an innovative “stock market” model for evaluating and managing city IT investments, which reportedly is being studied by Obama’s transition team as a potential national model. “That means we evaluate the management team running the project and how happy our customers are,” Kundra explained. “We also evaluate the performance — whether the National CTO: Who’s Got the Right Stuff? A look at two potential Obama appointees — D.C.’s Vivek Kundra and Google’s Vint Cerf. BY STEVE TOWNS | EDITOR EVEN BEFORE BARACK Obama’s election as president on Nov. 4, speculation had begun about who might be his CTO. By the end of November, the guessing game was in full swing, with a raft of industry titans purportedly in the running to be the nation’s new IT czar. Obama signaled his intention to name a national CTO in an eight-page Technology and Innovation Plan posted on his Web site, www.barackobama.com/issues/technology. The CTO would oversee federal government IT infrastructure and policies, promote government transparency, lead development of a national interoperable wireless network for first responders and promote technologyrelated economic development. Among the names circulating for the new post are Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bezos. But as some observers have mentioned, hard-chargJAN_09 ing industry executives may not be the best fit for the job. As many current and former government CIOs will tell you, the transition from private sector to public sector is often jarring. Private-sector transplants tend to be shocked at the amount of politics and bureaucracy they encounter in government. It’s not that they can’t succeed; indeed, many of today’s most successful government CIOs have a mix of public- and private-sector experience. But placing an entrepreneurial Internet CEO in the middle of the nation’s most complex bureaucracy could be a recipe for frustration, if not disaster. Tod Newcombe, editor of Public CIO, Government Technology’s sister publication, accurately pointed out in a recent Web editorial that a national CTO must understand the inner workings of government just as well as he or she understands technology. 28 http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology http://www.Amazon.com http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.