Federal CIO: Government Needs To Rethink Technology For 21st Century

Kundra laid out his objectives at the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) Conference in Baltimore Thursday, an organization quite familiar to him from his time as CIO of Washington, D.C.

"As we look forward at government in 2020, we have to fundamentally rethink how technology can be used," Kundra told the audience of state CIO executives and vendors.

While the federal government has made technological progress over the last 15 years, now a seismic shift must occur in order to fully leverage today's technological capabilities, he said.

"The first wave was to Webify our current institutions. We did that in the '90s, but all it did was connect citizens to bureaucracy. The federal government now has over 24,000 Web sites," Kundra said. "Next, was back-end integration, making sure we were collaborating on buying technology, and connecting payroll systems, HR systems. There's much work to be done on that front.

"Now as we move to the 21st century -- look at the average person's life; there's a whole digital experience that everyone goes to. You can e-mail to pay your mortgage on a PDA. Then you can make social plans using your favorite social-networking tool. Government needs to figure out how to move to a context-driven environment, to build the tools that are part of your digital life," he said.

Kundra noted that if you wanted to start a small business now, you have to file paperwork at the local, state and federal levels. Ideally, government should make it a more simple process, utilizing technology, he said.

"Government should take care of the complexities behind the scene, so you don't have to know the map, to get through to local to state to federal, and get lost in the bureaucracy of 24,000 Web sites," he said.

Kundra detailed five areas that he is focusing on as the nation's first federal CIO.

First, he said he is interested in creating a more open and transparent government, he said.

With such innovations, "People will know how their government is making decisions, where their money is going and, from a participatory perspective, we invest in the right technologies," he said.

The recently announced Recovery.gov Web site is an example of that transparency, he said. Over time, the site will detail how funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 have been spent, he said.

The second area of focus is lowering the cost of government operations, he said. The federal government has a $71 billion IT budget. Unfortunately, he said, historically those investments haven't always paid dividends.

"The government has not done a good job refining its requirements so the private sector could make proper bids. And the private sector has overpromised on the potential of emerging technologies, knowing it would not get the results that government thought it would. We need to evaluate technologies that yield dividends to make the lives of the people a little better," he said.

"Unfortunately, we have [historically] invested in technology for technology's sake. We're committed to rationalizing that portfolio. Why throw good money after bad money? What we need to figure out is what to invest in, what we need to divest in. There are unprecedented investments around broadband, health care IT [in the Stimulus Act]."

The third focus is cybersecurity, a critical issue and the emerging threat of the 21st Century, Kundra said.

"There is a threat from people who want to undermine our digital infrastructure. We need to look at how the federal government is organized and how we are able to respond in a positive way. Fed, state and local must work together," Kundra said.

The fourth focus is participatory democracy, where Americans can use technology to participate more in government, he said.

"A small example of that is the virtual town hall meeting the president had. We had over 100,000 people engaged and we got 3.5 million comments. Not only that, but when you think of rule-making, we have to make sure rule-making is not happening behind closed doors. We have to make sure the American people have a voice when it comes to policy. This administration ensures that we will leverage technology to do that," he said.

The fifth focus is finding new ways to think, Kundra said. For example, the Transportation Security Administration wanted to start a blog to communicate to the public. Kundra said he was told that it would cost $600,000 because you have to ensure that you follow security protocol, testing, analysis and more.

"Six-hundred thousand dollars for a blog? They went online working with a CIO, who said why not leverage free technology? They moved forward and now there's a blog. We had a default position for too long with what solutions cost too much," Kundra said. "We need to start thinking about a new path. Not all problems are as simple as a blog obviously, but in these tough economic times, the public sector needs to think about what is the promise of technology and figure out how to make sure it's baked into the culture of the federal government and create an environment where we can encourage innovation."

Kundra added that the federal government needs to look at cloud-based services to help reach the public, too, although he admits cloud computing won't solve every problem.

"But it is a tectonic shift in technology, the same way as the birth of the Internet," he said.

Kundra said he's working with a council of nine CIOs to explore cloud-based initiatives.

"We recognize we can't move all information, but unclassified info now might be a good candidate," he said. "We don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on video and networks that have already been created. Facebook alone has 200 million users, 56 million users are in the U.S. There's not a single Web site in the U.S. government that has that kind of reach and [Facebook users] are active on a daily basis."

Kundra also noted his planned data.gov Web site, where the government would publish data feeds currently not readily accessible to the public. It could help revolutionize Americans' participation in government, he said, citing two examples where shared information led to innovation: the Human Genome Project, where the National Institute of Health released data that led to an explosion of innovation around new health-care solutions, and satellite access that allowed the development of portable GPS devices.

"The goal is to democratize that data, obviously not what is sensitive in nature, and to encourage innovation. We need to tap into the ingenuity of the American people," Kundra said.