In April, 2009, under the leadership of DarleneMeskell and LisaNelson, the General Services Administration published a newsletter on Transparency and Open Government.. This publication presents the views of 21 IT leaders representing nations, state governments, federal agencies, municipalities, and private sector organizations. These 21 officials are leaders in developed countries working to ensure openness in Government. Contributors include VivekKundra, the new CIO of the United States federal government.
President-elect BarackObama said he will appoint a Tech Czar for the federal government. On the surface, the idea suggests that cross government collaboration between agencies and their data bases would occur, something agencies have resisted to date.
A Czar can be a good or a bad idea depending on the expectations and responsibilities of the job. Assume that one of the Czar’s responsibilities will be to get the agencies in the Department of Homeland Security to cooperate with each other and share data. It is not likely that the agencies such as the Secret Service with access to the president and the Coast Guard, the oldest agency in the government, will work easily with the other 26 agencies in Department of Homeland Security.
Again, assume that one of the Czar's duties is to help IRS, Homeland Security, and FAA to modernize. These are impossibly complex programs; and, even people who have worked on these systems for 20 years do not understand all of the intricacy. A newly appointed Tech Czar, even with unusual qualifications and daily support from the president and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, could not make major contributions to these and hundreds of similar systems in government.
One question is whether the Czar should be from industry or government. Either choice has advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that a Czar appointed from industry will have no chance to succeed without deep knowledge about the government and its culture. At the same time, someone from within government who knows how it works could be more successful, but will find it difficult succeed and gain respect of current peers.
Should existing CIO’s could be candidates? Unfortunately, most of the current CIO’s have marginal backgrounds and, to be generous, they are only somewhat successful in their current jobs. Some agencies have converted the CIO job into a political appointee position and some are woefully unqualified to lead the program. Not one of the current CIO jobholders is a good candidate to take on the whole of government.
In 1996, when 25 government and Congressional officials worked on the CIO bill, we were unanimous that the law should specifically not create a CIO sitting atop the entire government because such a role is impossible. We concluded that a government-wide CIO would end up meddling in the affairs of agencies while adding no real value to their programs.
However, a Czar could have success building on Web-2 technologies. Obama has strong experience in this sector of technology. He probably will move his Blue States contractor into the White House to build on the technologies that his team used in the presidential campaign to build the network of 2 million supporters and raise gobs of money. This area, social networking, is open to innovation in the government. A Czar who focuses in this area will have clear sailing because there is no competition at present.
The downside is that Web-2 social networking does not address the key to managing in government, which is getting control of the transactions. However, no one person in a Tech Czar job could ever do that anyway.
The Tech Czar avoid getting bogged down in the complex agency-run legacy systems that operate the government programs; and, instead, focus on untouched areas that directly serve the President's outreach goals.
Frank McDonough
Manage your way to success in your government assignments