Federal CIO Seeks Out Apple, Facebook, Google

Vivek Kundra was on the West Coast last week, where his schedule included meetings with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, and other tech innovators. The federal CIO says that U.S. government employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to the technology they use, and he's looking for better ways of working.Kundra was named federal CIO by President Obama a year ago this month, and closing the technology gap between the private sector and the public sector has been a pursuit of his since day one. He mentioned it during an interview with InformationWeek late last year and again in a blog post last week recapping his recent trip to Silicon Valley and the Seattle area.

In fact, when we sat down with Kundra to discuss his strategy for overhauling Uncle Sam's IT operations, he started there. His comments provide context to some of the IT-related announcements coming from the nation's capital:

"I begin with a simple question," Kundra said. "Why do we have access to technology that's far superior in our home lives than we do in the public sector? When we look at the public sector, what we see is that we've lagged behind when it comes to technology. We haven't leveraged it as effectively and efficiently. A big part of it is that there's been failed execution. We have a lot of great ideas and thousands of studies that are out there in terms of how agencies should operate, how agencies should course correct, but we haven't been able to embark on a strategy that thinks about the potential to unleash productivity of employees on the front line, that looks at government officials and thinks about how to arm them as information workers. What are the tools that government employees are going to need? And how do we introduce the same Darwinian pressures that we see in the consumer space in the public sector?"

You can read the full interview with Kundra here.

How does this philosophy play out in terms of technology implementation? In his blog post, Kundra makes reference to Apple's Apps Store, which served as a model for the government's Apps.gov site, launched in September. In case you missed it, Kundra last month revealed plans to add mobile apps to Apps.gov in a few months, including letting third-party developers create and offer apps that make use of government data.

In other examples, the White House, the U.S. Army, and a number of federal agencies have begun to make available apps for iPhones and other mobile devices. (See "White House Launches Mobile App" and "Army iPhone App Among Most Popular News Apps.") And, as we recently reported, U.S. intelligence agencies are adding social media tools, including games and other content for kids, to their Web sites.

In addition, Google and Microsoft are developing cloud services for government and a growing number of agencies are creating Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Even President Obama is on Twitter now.

So we can see early examples of how Kundra's strategy translates into government transparency and accessibility. But we're still in the early going, and it bears watching to see just federal employees are becoming more productive and how consumer tech leads to new and improved government services.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on cloud computing and service-level agreements. Download the report here (registration required).