My New National Tech Hero

I have to admit that over the past several decades I have become a cynic when it comes to the ability of government to deliver on time or on budget. My typical slight on a business that I believe is bloated is, "ABC Co. is just like the Department of Motor Vehicles". Usually, when I say this, people automatically understand that I mean that ABC Co. must be bloated, faceless, slow, and bureaucratic. I don't want to sound unpatriotic, but I had come to believe that our state and federal governments were too far gone to ever be considered nimble and dynamic. I struggled with the idea that privatization to more efficient organizations might be the only way to get things done in government. What would it look like if FedEx and UPS ran the US Postal Service? If we let some Swiss or German rail company run Amtrak? Imagine the geniuses at WalMart taking over supply chain management for the Pentagon.

These were just crazy visions of a guy who had written off government as never being able to efficiently deliver services. That was before I ever heard of Vivek Kundra. If you have not been paying attention to recent nominations by President Obama, Vivek Kundra was appointed the first Federal Chief Information Officer on March 5, 2009.

Mr. Kundra, 34, has a compelling life story. Born in India, his family moved to Tanzania at a young age. His first language was Swahili. When he was 11, his family moved to Gaithersburg, MD. He holds a BS in psycology and Master's of Science in Information Technology, both from the University of Maryland. After school, Kundra served as Vice President of Marketing for Evincible Software and CEO Creostar. In 2001, Governor Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia appointed him assistant secretary of commerce and technology. Kundra was the first person to hold dual cabinet roles in the history of Virginia. Kundra left his Virginia postion to take on the role in Washington DC, Mayor Adrian Fenty's cabinet as the District of Columbia's CTO (a rold which he held for 19 months, prior to accepting the post as National CIO). Kundra has kicked some butt while in his DC CTO position, overseeing 600 staff that provided technology services for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees, as well as 600,000 residents, businesses and millions of visitors.

One of the first initiatives that Kundra took on as DC CTO was to find a way to cost effectively empower DC employees to have better computing power and collaboration. To do this, he chose to use Google Apps, and other consumer technologies in the public sector to quickly scale. Another example of Kundra's success as DC CTO was when he set up a 30-day contest with a cash prize, called Apps for Democracy. The estimated cost for producing the contest, including the prize, was $50,000. Kundra estimated that the District probably saved close to $2.6 million over what it would have cost to hire contract developers. The contest invited developers to come up with the most innovative way to use data feeds from DC government for Web and mobile applications The contest resulted in 47 Web, iPhone and Facebook apps that benefited the city. In his October 15, 2008 essay, Building the Digital Public Square, Kundra wrote about how his Apps For Democracy team took the District's vast stores of data on all aspects of government operations and offered it up to everyone to use. By organizing the information into convenient catalogs and live data feeds, made available at the Data Catalog, anyone could go in and find information on crime incidents by date, time of day, ward, block or other methods. Other data on construction projects, parking, tourism, leaf collection schedules and various others were all made available, with more than 240 different data feeds made available.

Kundra envisions a digital public square, where everyone (constituents, policymakers, concerned citizens and businesses) can have access to important data without the traditional governmental red tape and cold/distant bureaucracy. Kundra is a fan of cloud computing to dynamically scale applications that are successful, without the bloated cost of building massive infrastructure on individual tech projects. What an amazing concept to bring to government!

In his new role as Federal CIO, Kundra wants to move the government away from its dependence on big IT contracts. He pointed to cloud-based services used by the private sector to quickly create and provision development platforms, as well as for information sharing, such as for photos and videos. "Yet, you look across the federal government, and we don't have a single platform that allows you do that," he said. "We have the ability to run an open, transparent, participatory and collaborative government."

If Kundra gets to implement his vision for the US Government, we can expect to see a change in how technology projects are spec'd, bid and delivered. I can't wait to see what is in store for US citizens. I can only imagine we will be watching YouTube videos on how to apply for Social Security benefits, or possibly using iPhone apps to vote in future federal elections.