Obama's CTO: Watch out for the turf wars
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.
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan. 
what concerns me is:
-Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad
-Protect American Intellectual Property at Home
I think, as it stands right now, copyright is ...flawed, it is used to controll and not to inovate, infact, lots of inovation is being snubbed by copyright.
what gives me hope is
Reform the Patent System
What we don't need is a privacy violating ass clown like Schmidt anywhere near the white house.
Obama has a chance to prove that he is not beholden to corporate interests by hiring someone with a lot of tech know-how but isn't part of the mainstream corporate world.
1. Limiting the Prefered Vendors for IT placement
2. Allowing IT Placement firms to make huge markups
This is no different than giving a huge bonus to a Wall Street Investment manager... except that IT workers don't know that IT placement firms are marking up IT services well over 100%.
For government, public companies, and corporations, there is no excuse for not disclosing the fee paid to the IT worker and to the IT Placement firm.
We don't need a bloated IT agency. We just need simple disclosure. The same disclosure for any other industry.
No wonder Obama is being advised to extend H-1-B visa's to cut the middle class IT workers out of the picture. Get honest, get transparent, and get some change in place!!!
A Video on how US IT Workers "feel" about IT Placement Agencies:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/frugal_times_call_for_frugal_apps
- by Prokofy Neva November 14, 2008 12:49 AM PST
- Obama's list of "technology initiatives" is overambitious, controversial, and contains too many subjects that should not be the chief purview of technology, as technology should be a handmaiden, not a driver of educational policy, for example.
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(11 Comments)I would hope this new position would coordinate agencies and move forward broader, consensus agendas rather than dictate policy on issues like the very fake "Net Neutrality" concept that is a cover for failure to curb or meter Net Consumption. It's been deliberately misportrayed as a "free speech" rather than a "free consumption" issue.
The "transparency of government" concept is very misleading. Anyone who has worked trying to make the government more transparent instantly realizes that knowing about something is not the same thing as changing it. Changing it takes politics and consensus, not newly-empowered tekkies making unilateral dictatorial decisions under the guise of "transparency".
I'd like to see Robert Scoble in this job just because he is friendly and curious and open and well wired of course, and the job of the first such czar should be getting government and people to become comfortable and interested with technology as a start. The next czar would then deal with implementing policy once there was a higher comfort level and understanding of what such technology does. I don't want this job to be a Trojan horse for all the people in Silicon Valley who paid for the Obama victory to take over government by stealth without elections and accountability.