Various news reports on Thursday indicated that Vivek Kundra, the CTO of Washington D.C. and one of the strongly rumored finalists for the job of President Obama's first national tech czar, will be named to a different Obama Administration post: administrator for e-government and
information technology in the Office of Management and Budget.
The Washington Business Journal reported that the announcement of Kundra's appointment would come Thursday. In the OMB role, Kundra would manage e-government projects under the federal Chief Information Officer. Kundra would replace Karen Evans, who served the OMB post under former President George W. Bush.
Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior is the other most frequently rumored finalist for the national job, and speculation continues, both about Warrior and about another recently rumored possibility: Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra.
Then again, some sources suggested, Kundra's appointment may only further muddy the waters. The National Journal Group's government technology news site, Nextgov.com, quoted an unnamed source as saying the national CTO job was rapidly losing its luster, and looking more like it would report to the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy instead of to President Obama himself.
"[Kundra]'s name had surfaced for the CTO position, but once everybody got a sense for where the CTO was going to be [within the administration], and it was just a bully pulpt rather than a position with clout, [the IT] role was probably more appealing," the source said to Nextgov.com.
Solution providers and other IT channel executives have echoed those same concerns -- if the position's going to be worthwhile and worthy of the hype that Obama gave it while on the campaign trail, it needs to have some serious objectives and a firmer role in the Administration.
