Maximally Entangled
January 16, 2009
Federal CTO - a position President-elect Obama’s new administration will create is arguably the most powerful technology shaping position in the world. You can make or break companies with the priorities you pursue for the USA. More importantly, bad execution on those priorities might make the difference between the USA coming out of a recession in Q2 2010 or Q4 2012.
There’s no question that the new position comes with an array of challenges for the nominee:
Digitizing the Healthcare Industry - Electronic Medical Records (will we finally attain consensus? or just achieve it through doggedness and impetus?)
Increasing connectivity across low-income areas of the USA. Increasing bandwidth (wired & wireless) across major metropolitan areas.
Making the Government’s interaction with the public more “social” - encouraging opinion polls via SMS/MicroBlogs/Web, an open collaboration platform for planning major & minor projects, improving procurement channels to allow smaller/nimbler/faster companies to assist the Government @ Fed/State/Local levels.
Streamlining & Consolidating data-centers by stipulating stringent Green standards for servers and setting a multi-year targets for Fed/State/Local agencies to improve energy efficiency within their environments. Whether they achieve this by virtualization and using fewer servers, DC power supplies, changing the light-bulbs or other means - it doesn’t matter.
Setting up a Procurement Assessment Taskforce (PAT) in every state to monitor all IT projects & procurements over $100,000 and have them reviewed every quarter. Each State PAT will have asset managers, each asset manager is responsible for reviewing x number of projects commensurate with track-record and experience. Treat each project like an asset - review performance and decide to buy or sell the asset. The Task Force should have the power to step in and manipulate the course of the project if it is deemed to be stagnating. This could mean more funding, termination, probation or another status depending on what occurs.
Get Cloud Computing going. If there is one sector that can benefit HUGELY from the cloud and has problems with enough scale to justify them - it is the Fed/State/Local Government. The new CTO should strongly consider setting up an agency called “Distributed Services Bureau” or DSB. The DSB will be responsible for identifying, outlining, vetting, selecting, planning & implementing distributed services @ Fed/State/Local level across the USA.
DSB will be critical to achieving Obama’s goal for a Greener, Leaner & Cheaper IT infrastructure for the next generation of Government services. DSB services will NOT utilize public clouds from Amazon or Google, but leverage similar technologies and patterns to build their own infrastructure.
DSB will enable the CTO to identify common services and seed them inside “GovClouds”. Depending on the scale, distribution & complexity of the service - they will be seeded centrally, coastally or across as hubs in major cities. By services, I am not referring to Web Services, this is @ 100,000ft level - an example service would be DMV driver’s license processing. Similarly, we would have cloud based services for Forms, Documents, Metadata related to a number of Public Services initiatives. If DSB executes correctly, the USA should see a drop in spending, increased resiliency & uptime, faster system updates - all running on Greener data-centers, commodity hardware and mostly Open Source software that embodies the “more eyeballs, fewer bugs” mantra.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
It gives me great pride that two people of India origin are in the running for this position. Padmasree Warrior and Vivek Kundra. Ms. Warrior needs no introduction in Silicon Valley - her achievements and failures are quite public, a good solid choice overall.
My vote however goes to Vivek Kundra, the current CTO of Washington D.C. - I’ve been following his initiatives in D.C. quite intently. He’s easily the most forward-looking CTO I know in the Government space and it doesn’t surprise me that he is 33 years old. You need to be young to understand the needs of the next generation. As a 27 year old, I will be the first to say Experience is more relevant than Age.
Google Apps, YouTube, Cloud Computing & Open Source - if it has promise, he tries it. And more IMPORTANTLY - he puts it to work in an effective manner. He’s savvy with the public and gets the job done. Sure, his rise has been meteoric and his overall Technical acumen might not be the best, but America’s CTO doesn’t have to be an Uber-Nerd. He needs to be an able facilitator and executor.
I hope the Obama makes the right choice and gets this ball rolling. Vivek - you have my vote!
Previous post Enhancing Gmail Attachment Handling I love Gmail, as does the world. It doesn’t surprise me remotely that it outpaces Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail in terms of year-on-year growth. As much Next post The Airbus A320 - Charmed Life? Plane lands in the Hudson river (US Airways) - A320 Plane busts a wing but somehow manages to avoid crashing catastrophically (Lufthansa) - A320