Obama's CIO Faces Uphill Battle

The Industry Standard — Vivek Kundra was one of InfoWorld's Top 25 CTOs last year, after he became chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. Killer quote from the article: "In my private life, I am in real time on my iPhone checking out the status of my stocks and the management team—so why can't I do that in the D.C. government?"

Kundra now gets to ask himself the same question about the U.S. government, in his new role as Federal CIO. The answers will be a lot harder: Political infighting led the director of the National Cyber Security Center to resign last week, a day after Kundra was appointed by President Obama. There was no connection between the two events, but the timing wasn't encouraging.

According to Government Technology magazine, one of Kundra's top priorities for the short term is to put government contract information and related data on the new administration's Recovery.gov site. Kundra said in a conference call that new reporting rules from the Office of Management and Budget make clear to state governors and city mayors that they will be held accountable for publishing contract information on their own economic recovery sites, such as economicrecovery.ny.gov.

Government Technology reports that Kundra is held in high esteem for his work at the state level in Virginia, and then later in the District of Columbia.

But Gartner analyst Brian Burke, who describes Kundra as "very bright, innovative, and driven," says Obama's new CIO will nonetheless need to come to terms with the lack of real authority given to his office:

I've met quite a few national government CIOs and they all have the same problem. They are given the responsibility to optimize whole of government architectures without the authority to get it done. In most cases they have influence over government departments but no real control. In many cases they play the role of advisor and cajoler but lack the backing to make real change. Clearly there have been some successes, but in most cases those successes occur after several failed attempts.

The problem is that the departments and agencies of the US Government are fiefdoms that are reluctant to give up control over investments. Harmonizing enterprise architectures creates winners and losers and departments will likely fight to avoid sub-optimization of the department to achieve of the optimization of government. I have seen many government-wide EA programs that have failed primarily because they underestimated the political, cultural and financial challenges.

Editor's note: Reprinted from The Industry Standard.