CIOs

On March 5, 2009 the United States officially recognized its first Chief Information Officer. University of Maryland alum Vivek Kundra was appointed by President Obama, and will also serve as Office of Management and Budget’s e-government and IT administrator. Formerly the Chief Technical Officer of the District of Columbia, Kundra also served as Infrastructure Technology Director for Arlington Country Virginia and Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology.

Kundra described his ideas for IT’s role in government in 2007: "My first approach coming into the public sector here in D.C. was to take as much data and put it out in the public domain as possible. I had three goals in mind: No. 1 was to drive transparency; No. 2 was to engage citizens; No. 3 was to ensure that we were lowering the cost of government operations." Under his leadership the District of Columbia (DC) changed how they look at Project Management. Like the stock market, only those projects that produced got additional capital. And Rather than build huge data centers, DC hired Google for its employees’ email, spreadsheet, and word-processing needs.

For Kundra, saving money is only the beginning. “One of the challenges that the government faces is, as we move more and more information, in terms of published information or whether it is [online] content, out in cyberspace - what's really important is that, on the back-end, the government is going to need to go through a transformation to ensure that we have the right resources to be able to respond to a new economy - to the digital economy.” Kundra was quoted during his first conference call following his appointment as US CIO.

Kundra will oversee policy and planning for federal IT investments, as well as security, information sharing and interoperability across all government agencies. Transparency has already arrived in the form of: http://www.data.gov, which provides public access to machine-readable data of the Executive Branch, and http://it.usaspending.gov which graphically displays federal spending on 7,000 IT projects. It’s a long way from helping his father fix computers in his classroom at Calvin Coolidge High School when he was in college. But doing more with less – what better inspiration?