New Federal CIO

Last month, President Obama announced the appointment of Vivek Kundra, as the new Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). There have been plenty of articles about the announcement over the past month. Mr. Kundra also got a lot of press in recent years about his role as CTO of the Washington DC City Government. I had the opportunity to hear him speak back in January at a meeting of the Washington DC CTO Roundtable. Here are a few notes I took from his presentation.

Kundra is big on data transparency and openness, using consumer technology, and project portfolio management. Below are a few notes on how he used those principles at the DC Office of the CTO:

Data transparency and openness:
- government has lots of data, unfortunately, most of it is unavailable to or difficult to access by the public.
- DC OCTO pushed many datasets to the web. It created a public, web-based data warehouse
- created APIs and held an Apps for Democracy competition that promotes allowing 3rd parties to create mashup applications using DC government and 3rd party data and services.
- created a new portal for citizens to access DC government and community information, http://dps.dc.gov/.
- tried to create transparency in and improve the government procurement process but unfortunately he was not entirely successful

Use of consumer technology:
- shifted departments to consumer-oriented and cloud based services such as Google Apps
- switched some first responders from expensive radios and hardened PCs to iPhone and Blackberries

Project portfolio management:
- Tracked projects using the following information: budget, project schedule, project team happiness, project news (milestones, changes, etc.)
- Had regular project review meetings
- instituted a buy, sell, or hold project status indication
- for projects with 'sell' statuses, the project team would have to defend the project in an Oxford-style debate with one of Kundra's deputies. If the project team loses the debate, the project loses funding.

It will be interesting to watch Kundra in his new role and see how successful he is in bringing his DCOCTO principles to the federal government.