This post was updated several times after 12:30 PDT with industry reaction.
President Barack Obama, in his weekly address Saturday, announced the appointment of Aneesh Chopra to serve as the nation's first chief technology officer.
Chopra, who is currently Virginia's secretary of technology, "will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities--from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure," Obama said.
Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's secretary of technology, is President Obama's pick for the nation's first chief technology officer.
(Credit: Virginia.gov)At the same time, Obama also announced the appointment of executive and management consultant Jeffery Zients to be the administration's chief performance officer. Zients, along with Chopra "will work closely with our chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, who is responsible for setting technology policy across the government, and using technology to improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs," the president said.
Chopra has led his commonwealth's "strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, to promote Virginia's innovation agenda, and to foster technology-related economic development," according to a White House press release.
Prior to his Virginia post, Chopra was managing director for the Advisory Board Company, where he advised executives on health care operations. That likely prepared him for Obama's proposed health care reforms, which focus heavily on information technology.
At the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee's State of the Net Conference in Washington earlier this year, Chopra talked of Virginia's initiatives to improve aspects of governance in areas like health care and education.
For example, Virginia was set to debut its physics "flexbook," comprised of Web-based instructional materials that cover areas of physics in which Virginia's traditional curriculum is lacking.
"You can make information more accessible, collaborate more, and people can do more to hold their elected officials more accountable," said Chopra, who was one of a team of volunteers serving on the Obama transition's technology, innovation and government reform police working group.
Although Chopra had reportedly been under consideration for months for a job in the administration and had put in long hours helping Obama's transition team, much of the speculation around the post surrounded candidates with Silicon Valley roots, as TechCrunch points out in a post with the headline, "Obama Spurns Silicon Valley Vets."
Others, like Tim O'Reilly, are praising Chopra as the perfect candidate due to his understanding of how to build a better government with the help of technology.
Mark Rutledge, director at McAfee's public sector business and former CIO for the state of Kentucky, also had strong praise. "Aneesh Chopra is a fantastic pick, he is a visionary and a great communicator. If I was looking for one person to bring change, and create energy he's the pick," he said in a statement
Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, also commended Obama for his choice. "Chopra is an excellent selection as he served proficiently in Virginia as Secretary of Technology and also has a strong background in the private sector advising the health care industry on technology management issues," he said in a statement. "He will bring to the position real world technology and public policy experience."
Updated 5:52 a.m. with details from the official announcement.
President Obama on Thursday named Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C.'s chief technology officer, to the position of federal chief information officer.
Kundra, who has served as a technology policy adviser for President Obama, will be responsible for coordinating the use of information technology and IT spending across government agencies, as well as creating more government efficiency through information sharing while maintaining sound security and privacy practices. Ahead of the announcement, an administration official confirmed Kundra's new role to CNET News following a report in The Washington Post.
In a statement, President Obama said:
Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position. I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.
In 2007, Kundra was appointed as Washington's CTO, a position in which he has overseen a staff of 600 and 86 agencies. As CTO of the federal district, he has been praised for making Washington's bureaucratic system more efficient and transparent through the use of technology, including applications from Google and Apple. Kundra has also been able to encourage the development of the city's tech sector, according to the Washington business community.
"He's charismatic and smart," Steve Moore, the president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Economic Partnership, told CNET News in an interview earlier this year. "He's a constant adviser for us on technology and what our priorities should be."
Before becoming CTO of Washington, D.C., Kundra served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the state of Virginia, where his role was to use technology to maximize government efficiency and business opportunities in the state--for instance, by developing a dashboard that used business intelligence to increase citizen participation in state procurement. He also assembled the largest United States trade delegation ever to visit India.
Kundra also has experience in the private sector. He served as vice president of marketing for the identity management company Evincible Software, and advised clients on IT governance as CEO of Creostar.
The president is also expected to name a federal CTO, another new position that has generated much speculation. Though the position has not yet been filled, the president has already tasked the CTO with the job of devising a plan to make the administration more Internet-friendly. The official will have until late May to finish the plan.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Cell phones and inauguration: Washington, D.C.'s "tech czar" Vivek Kundra
explains how cell phones will work during the Inauguration and what techonology
safety precautions have been taken. (1/17/09)
In one of his first official acts as president, Barack Obama ordered more government openness, marking an abrupt end to his predecessor's policy of extraordinary secrecy.
Obama's still-be-named chief information officer -- some speculation has centered on Washington, D.C., CTO Vivek Kundra -- is required to come up with ways within 120 days to make the administration more Internet-friendly. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")
The second memorandum overrules the Bush administration's controversial policy, issued a few weeks after September 11, 2001, instructing agencies to limit their responses to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests as much as possible. OpenTheGovernment.org said last fall that Bush had "exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information" but also of "suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources."
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's October 2001 memorandum promises that the Justice Department would "defend" decisions not to release materials, and an accompanying note talks about denying requests "to provide necessary protection in the wake of terrorism."
That's what Obama essentially revoked. Here's an excerpt from the FOIA memo:
The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears... All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.
And an excerpt from the memo "Transparency and Open Government":
Information maintained by the federal government is a national asset. My administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.
With reports all but confirmed that President-elect Barack Obama will be nominating Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission, speculation continues to grow over whom the incoming president may choose to be his chief technology officer.
An Obama transition team member would not confirm Genachowski's nomination but did not deny it. The transition team member could not say, however, whether the president-elect is any closer to naming a CTO.
Padmasree Warrior
(Credit: Cisco Systems)A report from BusinessWeek maintains that the choice has come down to two people who already hold the title of CTO: Padmasree Warrior, of networking giant Cisco Systems, and Vivek Kundra, who works for the city of Washington, D.C.
Kundra's office declined to comment on the speculation, but the CTO has been praised for making Washington's bureacratic system more efficient and encouraging the development of the city's tech sector.
"He's charismatic and smart," Steve Moore, the president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Economic Partnership, told CNET in an interview earlier this month. "He's a constant adviser for us on technology and what our priorities should be."
Representatives of Cisco could not comment on whether Warrior is under consideration for the role, though a Cisco spokesperson did say the company is a fan of Obama's plan to appoint a CTO.
"Cisco is committed to working closely with the Obama administration on their plans to deploy digital infrastructure to grow our economy and create jobs," the spokesperson said.
Warrior joined Cisco in 2007 after serving as CTO and then executive vice president at Motorola, where she oversaw an R&D budget of more than $3 billion and a team of 26,000 engineers. She was a part of Motorola, an Illinois-based company, for 23 years, and shares some ties with at least one Chicago-based Obama team member. Both Warrior and senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett sit on the board of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.
Anther possible contender for the national CTO position is Edward Felten, a computer science and public affairs professor at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Felten declined to comment on whether he is under consideration for the job.
It is still unclear exactly what role the CTO would play in the federal government.
"There are different ways to define a CTO's role, but along with the appointment, there may be some clarification of what exactly the role will be," Felten said.
As supporters of President-elect Barack Obama in Washington try to downplay near-term expectations for his administration's chief technology officer, an Obama aide on Tuesday said reports of an imminent announcement are incorrect.
With nearly of all Obama's cabinet named, recent speculation has swirled around whether news about the CTO post would be next, with one report saying to expect an announcement on Wednesday. The member of Obama's transition team, who asked not to be named, said that would not happen.
Still unclear are key details: who will fill the role, and what, exactly, the CTO will be tasked with doing. One possibility is that the CTO could be involved with, or even lead, policy groups handling topics as wide-ranging as Net neutrality, health information technology, and cybersecurity. Another is that the job could be limited to overseeing federal technology efforts--an area that could certainly use some improvement.
Or the position may fall somewhere in between, involving guiding other agencies in their use of technology. Creating an entirely new cabinet position with robust jurisdiction--and addressing consequential challenges such as turf wars, bureaucratic reorganization, and the development of a unique mentality for the office--could be too much to handle while trying to create an economic stimulus package, said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
"It is not clear to me (that) they may try to do it all at once," Black said. "If they do, I think it can succeed, it will just take a degree of attention and focus that they might not want to dedicate at the outset, with this much going on."
Former InterActiveCorp executive and Obama technology transition team member Julius Genachowski has been considered a strong contender for the CTO role, though he is also seen as a top choice for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The Washington Post reported last month that Genachowski may be more interested in the FCC position because of the CTO's limited responsibilities.
"There does seem to be some belief (that) if he wants (the chairmanship), he'll get it," said David Kaut, a telecommunications, media, and tech policy analyst for the firm Stifel Nicolaus, who donated money to Obama. "The FCC is going to be the big player, when it comes to making and implementing policy, but depending on how much weight Obama wants to give the CTO, they could be a player as well."
The FCC may have immediate jurisdiction over issues like broadband deployment, Kaut said. While broadband deployment may not be a part of the stimulus package currently under development, Obama has indicated that it will be part of his plan for economic recovery.
"Technology seems to have fallen down the list of priorities, but I think they see it as a key to long-term competitiveness and growth," Kaut said. "The Democrats and Obama see a need for much more proactive policy to make broadband a driving force of U.S. competitiveness."
Other potential candidates for the CTO position have experience spanning government and industry, including Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon.com's CEO, and Blair Levin, managing director for Stifel Nicolaus, the former chief of staff for the FCC chair in the mid-1990s, and a member of Obama's technology transition team.
The transition team has also brought on Washington, D.C.'s own CTO, Vivek Kundra, as a technology policy adviser, and he's another potential candidate for the national CTO position.
Steve Moore, the president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Economic Partnership, says Kundra's understanding of technology has been critical to stimulating the city's economic growth.
"The power behind social-networking sites--(Kundra is) taking that and plugging it into business," Moore said. "It's not just a cooler marketing tool; it's a fundamental change in the way you do things. Can that play nationally? I think that's the question all of us are asking."
When President-elect Barack Obama appoints a chief technology officer to the White House, he should make the new appointee a part of his senior economic policy team and the chief "evangelist" for innovation-spurring policies, the software and hardware industries say.
The Business Software Alliance, which represents companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and others, sent a letter to Obama last week with suggestions for what role the CTO should play in the administration. The BSA has taken other steps in the past week, such as meeting with the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Wednesday and releasing its 2009 policy agenda on Thursday, in an appeal to the next Congress and administration to integrate information technology solutions into its policy prescriptions, both in the short term and long term.
"When dealing with every major issue, there should be a question of what is the role of IT in providing the solutions," BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said Thursday.
BSA President Robert Holleyman sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama suggesting he make his chief technology officer a part of his senior economic policy team.
The industry's goals are largely aligned with the president-elect's, Holleyman said, including Obama's proposal to push for increased adoption of health IT. New legislation and a new approach to cybersecurity is needed as well, BSA members said, to improve both the government's cyberinfrastructure and its communication with citizens regarding the security of personal information.
As lawmakers integrate IT measures into new legislation, they'll have to avoid some pitfalls, the BSA and its members warned. Health IT is seen as an "enormous opportunity" for the industry, Susan Mann, Microsoft's senior director for intellectual property policy, said Thursday. However, Congress needs to ensure there are adequate privacy protections in place and that the government does not end up with "a system of winners and losers."
Congress needs to "provide incentives for folks to invest and innovate in this area," she said, and "make sure all companies with solutions to bring to the table can compete."
Holleyman said the BSA has been working closely with Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.) to ensure "we don't lock into place or fossilize a particular technology." Stark proposed health IT legislation that initially mandated an open source platform, Holleyman said.
"It would be mistake to say we're only going to look at open-source solutions," Holleyman said.
Ensuring electronic health records remain private is particularly tricky, Mann said, since the information by its very nature needs to be shared. However, strong privacy requirements for health records are already in place through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, said Kevin Richards, Symantec's federal government relations manager.
"I would encourage Congress to not reinvent the wheel," he said.
Securing information in cyberspace
He does, however, support reforming data breach notification law. Currently, 44 states have their own laws in place, making it difficult for software companies to comply with all of them.
"Next year you'll see a tsunami of data breach bills," Richards said. "A lot of these bills were introduced previously, but we believe the issue is ready for prime time."
The industry has been working to push the issue in numerous congressional committees and is advocating for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to consolidate all the data breach legislative efforts.
"The bogeyman of data security has been jurisdictional issues," Richards said.
The BSA has been working closely with the government to secure its cyberinfrastructure, and on Wednesday senior representatives from eight of its member companies met privately with DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"Our industry has invested considerable resources into that partnership to protect cyberinfrastructure," said Franck Journoud, BSA manager of information security policy.
The public-private partnership, however, has been strained at times, he said.
"Sometimes it has worked really well, sometimes it hasn't worked well at all," Journoud said. "In some situations, we felt our ability to learn from DHS and the various entities involved in cybersecurity about policy development, and our ability to input into policy, was limited. Those policies can have a considerable impact on our ability to manage and operate that infrastructure."
While the BSA has voiced its support for the cybersecurity report produced by a Center for Strategic and International Studies commission, it has not taken a position on the report's suggestion to transfer cybersecurity responsibilities away from DHS to the White House.
ObamaCTO.org provides a forum for defining, ranking and discussing the key tech priorities for the nation.
While the technology pundits are debating the role of an Obama administration CTO, a few programmers in Seattle yesterday decided to do something more useful. Using an application from UserVoice, they launched ObamaCTO.org, a site, unaffiliated with the Obama machine, that allow citizens to list and vote on what should be the top tech priorities for the new administration.
"User voting is an easy way for people to prioritize ideas," said Matt Lerner of Frontseat.org, which created the site. While the voting on this site is more like on Digg than a scientific sampling, and can be gamed, it is part of the Internet-fueled movement to give more of voice to the populace. The Obama campaign provided ample evidence of the benefits of using the Web for massive outreach. Now the question is how much weight the wisdom of the crowd will carry in influencing the direction of government policy.
Lerner and his co-workers are focused on making use of public data for civic good. "We have been interested in all the government data that is available," he said. "There is a treasure trove, such as data on campaign finance and voting records, but it is not standardized or structured, and doesn't have any APIs. Many innovations would be created if the data were available to programmers."
He gave a few examples of applications built around government data. Voting records are publicly available but must be accessed from each county in the U.S. and then normalized. "You could have maps of a block and see who hasn't registered to vote as a way to get out the vote," Lerner explained. Voter data is available from private firms such as Catalyst Consulting, Lerner said, but is expensive.
With census data on whether people drive, walk, or take public transportation to work, activists could encourage people to be more environmentally responsible. Frontseat.org developed Walk Score, which ranks the "walkability" of 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities.
Walk Score rates thousands of neighborhoods and ranks them on how walkable they are.
See also: Micah Sifry--Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is out of the running for the chief technology officer (CTO) position that the Obama administration is planning to create. In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Schmidt said, "I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no." Schmidt will remain a close adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, but his first call to duty is Google.
Based on the job description below, it could be difficult to find a worthy candidate from the private sector willing to take on a task of such enormous scope in an environment known to chew up and spit out White House policy czars.
Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.
The Obama administration's CTO job could be one of those bureaucratic positions that ends up consumed by turf wars rather than making real progress against initiatives. CNET News' Stephanie Condon noted the overlaps, which could turn into conflicts, between a White House CTO and CTOs working in various agencies:
The jurisdiction of a CTO could overlap with other agencies or executive positions in areas such as innovation policy, cybersecurity, or intellectual property enforcement. To avoid those overlaps, the Obama team will have to decide, for instance, whether the CTO would focus on goals like making agencies more efficient or take on a broader agenda such as dictating policy.
Just creating and implementing a coherent technology plan and policy for the numerous agencies under the Department of Homeland Security is an incredibly daunting task for a CTO. The DHS Directorate of Science and Technology, for example, has a budget of $830 million. It has 250 projects in process and 50 percent of them are expected to fail, according to Jay Cohen, Under Secretary for Science and Technology for the DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security organizational chart. The DHS is trying to achieve information flow across 87,000 different federal, state, and local governmental jurisdictions.
(Credit: Department of Homeland Security)The Obama administration has a long list of tech initiatives (see below). The focus should be on having the best technical minds and management working on each initiative--the White House CTO as chief tech policy evangelist, inter-agency liaison and human capital recruiter.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, HP CTO Shane Robison, who has been touted as a White House CTO candidate, believes that a White House CTO would need to focus on a few key tech initiatives and not just serve as an administrator or liaison between CTOs across the government.
This approach to the White House CTO job makes the most sense in terms of being able to accomplish specific objectives. In addition, Obama is fielding his own technology council of private and public sector titans, as his predecessor did with his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), to advise and help out on key issues.
(Credit:
CBS News)
As the rookie U.S. senator who was catapulted into the White House on the back of the Internet, Obama knows that technology is a key enabler for his President 2.0 administration. He keeps a BlackBerry or iPhone on a holster on his hip, although his campaign Flickr photo library appears to devoid of pictures of Obama using his smartphone. (It must not yet be considered appropriate to show the president-elect text messaging.)
The technology to accomplish his long list of goals exists, but the funding, expertise, focus and political will is lacking in many areas. Transforming the U.S. government technology infrastructure from a plodding battleship (outside of the NSA and a few other high-tech agencies) into a speedy, adaptable ship built for the Internet age isn't going to be solved in the Obama era. But great progress can be made if the White House CTO can recruit into agencies the kind of people who helped Obama transform the way electoral campaigns are run and stimulate young people to study science curriculums.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has taken himself out of the running to be the United States' first chief technology officer.
"I love working at Google, and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no," Schmidt said Friday when queried on the subject by CNBC host Jim Cramer during an appearance on his television show. (In a New York Times interview published Saturday, he also said, "I am extremely happy serving the shareholders of Google as the CEO, so I have no interest in serving as a government employee.") Schmidt then quickly changed the subject by steering the conversation toward reports that Microsoft was trying to steal Verizon's search deal from Google.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says he likes running his company too much to serve as President-elect Barack Obama's chief technology officer.
Schmidt, who campaigned on behalf of President-elect Barack Obama, has been advising the Obama campaign on technology and energy matters, and is Transition Economic Advisory Board.
As my colleague Declan McCullagh notes, it's not an easy job to assume:
Obama wants the CTO to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the 21st century," plus protecting the security of .gov computer networks. That's a pretty tall task for one person.
So, if Schmidt has excused himself, who else is up to the challenge? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf has been suggested as a candidate. Google's chief Internet evangelist publicly supported Obama, primarily because of his position on Net neutrality. But if Cerf's boss at Google took a pass, will Cerf be comfortable accepting the position?
Ex-regulator has also been suggested as a candidate for the position.
- prev
- 1
- next
