What are the top priorities for our nation's first CTO?

One of the promises of our new President-elect Obama is to establish a role of CTO in his new administration. A lot of blogger and media attention has focused on potential candidates for this position, among them Eric Schmidt of Google and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons. However, I think it is more important at this point to participate in a dialogue about the initiatives that will be tackled by our new CTO.

ObamaCTO.org (built on the UserVoice platform) was launched yesterday and garnered a bunch of attention on Twitter and the likes of Dan Farber, BoingBoing and the New York Times Bits Blog. I created two priority entries:

1. encourage adoption of Agile software development practices
2. standardize on Ruby on Rails for custom web app development

The first one about adoption of Agile is totally serious and I believe it's one of the only ways to reduce costs and improve effectiveness and success rates of government-sponsored IT projects. For example, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Directorate of Science and Technology has an annual budget of $830 million. It has 250 projects in process and 50 percent of them are expected to fail, according to Jay Cohen, Under Secretary for Science and Technology for the DHS.

Breaking that status quo is going to be a ridiculous challenge and will require radical and idealistic thinking from the top.

The second priority suggestion, to "standardize on Ruby on Rails" is just one of my (unabashedly self-serving) pet causes that I'm not 100% serious about, but I think merits some debate. Does it make sense for the government to standardize on any particular technology? My fear is that the normal way that government agencies go about making technology decisions is skewed towards big vendors with money and influence and without a degree of activism on our part, projects will continue to be based on proprietary and brain-dead old technology.

By the way, the Obama transition team also announced its internet outreach staff yesterday, but as far as I can tell everyone named so far comes from the existing group of insiders already involved with Obama via campaign operations. I will be much happier if/when I begin to see Web 2.0 thought-leaders such as Lawrence Lessig drafted for those jobs. Frankly, I'm still somewhat dazzled that Obama actually won and that we're having this conversation with any degree of seriousness.

Comments

[Ron]

Do you really think it would be a good idea for the US federal government to standard on a language (Ruby) that doesn't natively support Unicode?

[Ron]

Opps, that should be "standardize", not "standard"

[Matt]

"Breaking that status quo is going to be a ridiculous challenge and will require radical and idealistic thinking from the top."

Very very true.

I have spent the last year or so working on a federal web application support contract. The agency has been pushing the adoption of Web 2.0 applications / ideas / or just buzzwords. Some progress is being made - we have the first LAMP environment that has ever existed at this agency now up and running with internal blogs and wikis now being deployed. However, getting people to actually embrace the technology or to grab a hold of some solid business cases to leverage this tech against is the next step.

The timing could not possibly be any better. The CBO estimates that slightly over 40% of the civilian federal workforce - Joe and Jane Bureaucrat - will be retiring in 5 years. 40%! Who is going to replace them? Digital natives that's who. Now is the perfect time to start establishing a Web 2.0 infrastructure so that the next generation of the workforce hits the ground in an environment that they are accustomed to.

"My fear is that the normal way that government agencies go about making technology decisions is skewed towards big vendors with money and influence"

Form what I have seen this is certainly generally true in government IT, but my limited experience has shown that there is currently a very real opening for open source technologies within the federal Web 2.0 space. All of the limited growth in this space is occurring organically because there is zero budget for the implementation of new technology suites - especially technologies that the people controlling the purse strings don't understand. Without a formal budget there is no RFQ, RFP, or other acronym-y budget steps that typically bring the big vendors running. Typically the growth in this space is happening because some fed gets motivated to take a small leap in the Web 2.0 direction or is aware of buzzwords and has some available contractor dollars to spend on someone like me who can help them walk that direction.

Additionally, the big vendors like Oracle, MS, and IBM have certainly embraced Web 2.0 techs, but their software's focus tends to be on helping organizations collaborate internally. What the fed really needs is both that focus and another: to communicate more effectively with the public. This is not something that the big vendors have pre-built packages to roll out.

I really dug seeing this post on your blog Obie. Hopefully Obama seeking out a CTO will generate some interest in what the government internet presence could be if it had some thought put into it. And some thought leaders like yourself talking about it. Hell, in an economically uncertain time the government is the spender of last resort - maybe Hashrocket should snag a government contract or two as a hedge!