President Obama today announced that Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District, will be the federal chief information officer.
It's a job that did not exist in previous administrations; Obama, who leveraged social networks, text messages and other Internet tools on the campaign trail, promised to create a technology czar with the aim of helping the government operate more efficiently.
The newly created federal position will operate under the auspices of the White House. Kundra, 34, is expected to oversee how government agencies purchase and use information technology and will be in charge of all federal technology spending. He also will be responsible for making sure agencies' networks and systems work together and share information while maintaining security and privacy standards.
Obama also plans to appoint a chief technology officer who will work closely with Kundra, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcements are not yet official. The exact job description for that position has not yet been announced, but the chief technology officer might focus more on overall technology policy while the chief information officer will handle day-to-day spending and operations within agency projects. Read the rest at WaPo
More on Kundra from Network World:
Kundra, who previously served as the CTO for D.C.'s city government, has received a good deal of acclaim for his work in making that government act more transparently and economically. Among other things, Kundra has slashed the city's IT costs by shifting government e-mail and work applications over to Google Apps and has pushed for more transparency by posting lists on the Web of jobs that government contractors have been hired to perform.
As the federal government’s CIO, Kundra will oversee a $71 billion information technology budget and ensure IT interoperability between government departments. During a conference call this morning, Kundra said that he will be looking at how the government could both improve its technology investments and make more information accessible to citizens through the Internet.
Kundra said that when he took over as CTO of Washington, D.C., he was surprised at how technologically primitive public sector workplaces were compared to their private-sector counterparts.
Here he is in 2008 as Chief Technology Officer, Government of the District of Columbia
