Comments on: CTO of the United States?

By: PHB

PHB — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:49:06 +0000

Vint Cerf, Dave Farber and Bill Joy would be excellent choices for a technology panel. But none of them has CTO experience. Vint comes closest, but I am not sure he would want the job.
The problem of the Federal government is not a lack of vision. The problem is if anything rather too much vision and too little understanding of how to get from where they are to where they want to get.
Pretty much every government IT project turns out to be a failure. Not just in the US, it is a worldwide phenomena. One problem is the over-reliance on consultants. I have been in government IT project kick off meetings where there are 20 consultants round the table, no civil service.
One reason for the systemic failures has been a tendency to embrace dramatic change rather than incremental. So a big four consulting firm comes in and embarks on a waterfall model development process because thats what works best – for the consultants.
What this is about is how to identify structural weaknesses in the mass of existing IT infrastructure, triage and replace. It is not about what we should have, it is about how to get there, and how to circumvent the entrenched career civil service interests.
The relevance of a Czar here is that in every administration the political appointees have a major difference in their interests with the career civil service heads who have reached the maximum rank and cannot progress further on career track. The career track appointees are only interested in not making a mistake, they only have downside, there is no upside. The political appointees know that their IT systems suck but do not have the skills or knowledge required to identify the defects.
Czars can be very effective when their interests are aligned with that of the political appointees as is the case here. They can bring in the folk to explain the how and why. Instead of being ripped off by the usual beltway bandits the department can be given good advice. At worst they are going to get advice as bad as consultant advice for less cost.
Czars certainly do not work in cases where the czar is competing with the political appointees as is the typical case.
The Clipper chip issue is completely irrelevant here. That was never pushed by a Czar. It was Stuart Baker at the NSA and then Louis Freeh at the FBI. There never was a Clipper chip Czar. If there had been a CTO they would have been in a position to ask just what the FBI was doing with all the information they wanted to collect and we might have discovered Freeh was a total incompetent before 9/11.
What you want there is someone with experience as an industry CTO and experience of government IT practices.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:38:45 +0000

I have not paid close attention to this, because I think in its own way it is as much of a gimmick as the “CEO president” claim was (and we saw how *that* turned out).
However, given Obama’s academic history, and some of his focus as a legislator, my take on this is that he has two things in mind: rationalizing how the feds “do IT”, and improving the way IT-related research an education are funded/conducted. These are two very distinct goals — in fact, I think the skill sets they require are disjoint. The former has much, much, *much* more of an operational focus. It’s not clear to me that — given the civil service jobs that are involved — the President can do much to improve how the federal government gets IT done. There are cultural and structural inefficiencies that make me very pessimistic. With regard to education and research, I think the story is different. In that area, hiring anyone who is not a current world-caliber researcher (or maybe a high-level administrator at an institution brimming with them) would be a mistake. Not sure where Bill Joy fits in, but much as I love his earlier, funny films (“man vi” for details), his is not a name that comes to mind. I have no clue why Doerr threw it out there, but as a VC he is consitutionally (no pun intended) way more risk-tolerant than I’d want the POTUS to be, and I’d discount his suggestions accordingly.

By: tim

tim — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:09:38 +0000

I disagree that a CTO is a CIO on steriods. Most CTOs don’t have operational responsibility, don’t have large staffs (if any), and technical experience lies in the industry they serve (e.g. medical device manufacture – the CTO would most likely be a licensed physician).
Saying that I am always concerned when the government wants to create a new “Czar” for something. Their track record isn’t that great. Actually its downright lousy. Think of the Drug Czar or the days when the Clinton administration wanted to shove Clipper down all our throats. I think this position will be completely irrelevant.

By: Lyger

Lyger — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:32:03 +0000

This question came up in a recent discussion among friends. Dave Farber and Vint Cerf were two names that were mentioned in passing. Wondering who else might interest EC readers… ?