Vivek Kundra
A CTO’s views on the new Fed CTO
I’m very pleased with the pick of Aneesh Chopra as the Federal Government’s CTO. I wish I could add more context than that, and was thinking of a quick biographical sketch of Aneesh and some ideas on why this is great news. Then I read Tim O’Reilly’s post at OReilly Radar, and frankly I just totally agree with everything Tim said. Please check out his post at:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/aneesh-chopra-great-federal-cto.html
Here is an excerpt that particullarly resonated with me:
“Chopra has been focused for the past three years on the specific technology challenges of government. Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government policy, competing constituencies, budgets that
often contain legislative mandates, regulations that may no longer be relevant but are still in force, and many other unique constraints. In his three year tenure as Secretary for Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills. In fact, last year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers ranked Virginia #1 in technology management. ” Read the rest of this entry »
Vivek Kundra: Still the Alpha CTO and now the First Fed CIO
Today’s news on Vivek Kundra’s role in the federal space made me think of another CTO, Yuvi Kochar. Yuvi, the CTO of the Washington Post, is a great connector of CTOs who leads the informal collective of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable. Although I had heard Vivek speak a time or two, the first really deep interactions I had with
Vivek were through Yuvi’s work in service to the tech community and I much appreciate that.
For a quick update on Vivek from a CTO perspective see: Read the rest of this entry »
Vivek Kundra: The Alpha CTO
Every CTO I know has heard of Vivek Kundra, CTO of
the District of Columbia. We have all been following his accomplishments
in transforming the technology program in DC and have watched in excitement as
more and more capabilities have been rolled out to serve the city and its
citizens. We have followed reports of bold moves he put in place to ensure
technology programs deliver. We have read about his new approaches to
technology portfolio management and watched as he discussed the leap ahead he
delivered to his enterprise by his audacious, courageous use of Google Apps and
other cloud-based solutions.
If you are not one of those familiar with Vivek, here
is a short bio: Vivek Kundra is the CTO for the
District of Columbia where he leads an organization of over 600 staff that
provides technology services and leadership for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees,
residents, businesses, and 14 million annual visitors. He brings to the role of
CTO a diverse record that combines technology and public policy experience in
government, private industry, and academia. Previously, Vivek
served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the Commonwealth
of Virginia, the first dual cabinet role in the state’s history. In the
private sector, Vivek led technology companies
serving national and international customers. Earlier he served as Director of
Infrastructure Technology for Arlington, Virginia. He also taught classes on
emerging and disruptive technologies at the University of Maryland. Since Vivek became District CTO, he has been honored with major
IT awards. In 2008, the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium recognized him among
outstanding IT innovators. In addition, InfoWorld Magazine named Vivek among
its “CTO 25”.
I recently saw Vivek at a meeting of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable,
an informal collective of area CTOs led by Yuvi Kochar, CTO of the Washington
Post Company. Before the meeting we chatted about mashup technologies (including his Apps for Democracy contest and also JackBe). During the meeting Vivek discussed several
aspects of his innovative efforts to transform the District’s information technology
infrastructure. A point that struck me was his leadership through
principles. Three key ones he articulated were: 1) Leveraging commercial
technology, 2) Driving transparency, and 3) Rethinking notions of IT
governance.
Vivek and I just finished a phone call where we discussed these and other items
in more detail. Here is a bit more on his approach.
1) Leveraging commercial technology: Commercial radios and cell phones
allowed a rapid enhancement of the tactical communications infrastructure of
the DC workforce, including the police workforce. Police squad cars are
also now equipped with commercial, but toughened, laptops. Commercial web
technology has been leveraged in ways that leaped ahead of old clunky office
automation and also enable rapid development and mashups.
2) Driving transparency and engaging citizens: Technology
impediments to information access and information sharing were eliminated in
ways that enable citizens to see how government decisions are being made.
Data was also exposed in ways that enabled mashups and agile
programing/development. Examples include DCs digital public square and
Apps for Democracy efforts.
3) Rethinking notions of IT governance: Totally new, innovative ways to
manage IT portfolios were created and used to ensure all stakeholders could
evaluate the technology program and better make informed decisions on when to
terminate programs and where to invest more money. Chief among these
innovations was an approach to portfolio management that replicates a stock
market trading floor. More important, however is the relentless focus on
performance and innovation to support performance. Beside rethinking
these notions of governance Vivek also took measures to smartly
watch/reduce/reprioritize IT costs.
I asked Vivek for thoughts that might be relevant to technologists who have set
their sites on careers where they can deliver results. Many of us would
like to follow in his footsteps. I wondered, if there is a particular
computer programing language we should all be learning now? Should we be
diving into Python? That’s hot now. And what about databases? MySQL
and Hadoop are all the rage. The thoughts I got back from Vivek were
incredibly insightful and far more relevant than the simplistic question I
asked.
V: Technology is important, and we do need to know technology. But in these very exciting times where
Moore’s law pushes us all forward it is actually more important to be able to quickly learn new technology rather than focus on one and only one. This is the beauty of the new world of
technology. There is always something to learn. We should also always remember that the reason to learn is the mission. To an enterprise CTO, technology by itself is worthless. Technology
only has value if it addresses business problems and drives business success.
Therefore technologists must have an ability to translate between the worlds of
mission needs and technology and need an ability to rapidly learn and deeply
understand both.
I asked Vivek for his intention for sharing his models and methods, since they
have clearly delivered success in DC. He is doing quite a bit there so
all of us who would like more info have plenty of ways to learn more:
V: The DC CTO site at http://octo.dc.gov
provides links to many of the ongoing activities of the office and for those
who would like more on the models that produce the results we link to policies,
guidelines and procedures. We also provide information on how our
governance process works. But additionally we host visits to our
office by interested parties and have begun blogging about them. In
another effort we hope will help move the models forward we are pressing ahead
with plans to turn our stock market approach to portfolio management into an
open model and will open source the code that makes it work, which should help
drive more innovation there.
Speaking of innovation, Vivek seems to have found a way to accelerate
innovation, which is something all CTOs are interested in doing. I asked
him for his thoughts on where to look for innovation. Another interesting
reply:
V: You can look for innovation many places, but remembering that
necessity is the mother of invention you should keep an eye open for places
that innovate because they really need to. I always keep an eye on the
developing world and am so incredibly amazed at the tech innovation
there. Enterprise IT does not mean that every program and project must be
delivered with huge budgets and huge staffs and the incredible innovations
coming out of the developing world prove that time and time again. I’m
excited and enthused about developments like cell phone voting in Estonia,
electronic census that works in Chili, fishing villages around the world using
instant direct data to plan movement. Innovation occurs many places, but
some of the greatest lessons for innovation are coming from the developing
world.
I asked Vivek about how to find balance between setting standards and enabling
innovation:
V: Standards are important, but if a standard gets in the way of
innovation kill it. Use standards that enable innovation.
This is the role of the CTO.
Vivek also offered thoughts on social networks.
V: In seeking ways to make your cycles of innovation move faster, never
underestimate the power of social networking tools and the networks you can
build with them. Facebook is the example most talked about but there are
many others including networks built around ecommerce like eBay and
Amazon. I believe we should not only embrace them to enable the power of
social networking but to help us leverage, in a large way, the IT
infrastructure of these platforms. The new generations today are making
maximum use of these platforms and I view this as a very optimistic point.
As for me, I view the results of Vivek Kundra and his models as optimistic
points. The great thing about being a CTO is the learning never stops in
this field and Vivek is a great teacher we should all be learning from.
For more on Vivek and the way hew views technology, including some of his inputs to the Obama adminstration, see: http://www.ctovision.com/2009/01/federal-government-technology-directions-and-the-fed-cto.html
Vivek Kundra: Democratizing Data and Putting it in the Public Domain
I'm hoping most enterprise CTOs have had a chance to learn more about Vivek Kundra's Apps for Democracy initiative. I'm really impressed by this activity for many reasons, but primarily because it got results of use to the citizens and visitors of DC. This initiative proved yet again that Vivek Kundra is a CTO who gets things done. From his bio:
to the Cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District
of Columbia. As CTO, Kundra leads the Office of the Chief Technology
Officer (OCTO), an organization of over 600 staff that provides
technology services and leadership for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees,
residents, businesses, and millions of visitors.
Prior to this Vivek was getting things done in the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the private sector, and in Arlington Virginia.
In his current position he became an instant hero to an entire enterprise when he took the bold step of moving his enterprise to a Google Apps foundation. The video below provides some background on this move.
An equally wise, and similarly bold move was Vivek's initiative called Apps For Democracy. This contest began with Vivek insuring that the DC government is being as open and transparent with data as possible, exposing data in a variety of common formats. This was no simple task, requiring vision, perseverance, and a dedication to plow through city hall obstacles that only a motivated leader could tackle. Vivek set the groundwork for success by working with a great thought leaders like Peter Corbett at iStrategyLabs and by coordinating with Internet enthusiasts like the crew at Mashable. The Strategy Labs team created a proposal for this project and brought this project to life in six days! created a page encouraging mashup entries, and the result was an incredible generation of capabilities that serve DC citizens and visitors to our Capital. 47 applications were created in a way that did not require long procurement processes or costly integration contracts. What do the apps do? Check them out yourself here: medal-winners
My favorite: DC Historic Tours. This is really really cool. Thanks Vivek!
For more see the video below:
Apps for Democracy from Shaun Farrell on Vimeo.
What else can I say about Vivek? He also has great models for internal program management. His approach is nothing like the one I learned from Gartner the everyone trys to implement. And it is better than the one I learned in the corporate world that worked very well for us at TRW and Northrop Grumman. His approach is nothing like the one we used at DIA. In fact, if I had it to do over again I would use his approach in my old enterprise. For more on his way, see the write up for his 2008 InfoWorld Top 25 CTO award.
So hey, what's next? My hope is that the methods and models of Vivek (and iStrategylabs) are applied across the nation and up to state and federal levels. Think of the good that could be done.
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