[Infowarrior] - Federal CTO Picked

[Richard Forno]

www.internetnews.com/government/article.php/3816126

Obama Makes Surprise Pick for Federal CTO
By Kenneth Corbin
April 18, 2009

President Obama today announced his choice for the nation's first  
chief technology officer, bringing a months-long guessing game to an  
end with a pick that virtually no one saw coming.

Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's Secretary of Technology, landed the job. In  
his weekly Internet and radio address, Obama said the new position  
aims to "promote technological innovation to help achieve our most  
urgent priorities -- from creating jobs and reducing healthcare costs  
to keeping our nation secure."

Obama said that Chopra will work closely with White House CIO Vivek  
Kundra, who oversees the government's technology budget and internal  
IT policies.

Both positions are creations of the Obama administration, and stand as  
further evidence of the importance the president places on technology.  
After running an impressively tech-savvy campaign, Obama has pledged  
to use the Web to make more government information easily accessible  
to the public.

"The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and  
ensure that they know exactly how we're spending their money -- and  
can hold us accountable for the results," Obama said.

Of course, the idea of a fully open, transparent e-government is often  
at odds with the bureaucratic realities of Washington, where legacy  
systems, arcane reporting structures and security issues have come as  
a culture shock to Obama staffers who joined the administration from  
the campaign.

Chopra, who previously served as managing director of the hospital  
consulting Advisory Board Company, is a largely unknown figure in  
Silicon Valley. Obama was widely expected to pick a top gun in the  
industry, with figures like Google's Eric Schmidt and Vint Cerf,  
Microsoft's Bill Gates and Cisco's Padmasree Warrior topping many  
people's shortlists.

In his four years heading Virginia's technology efforts, Chopra worked  
extensively on health IT issues, which Obama has repeatedly said ranks  
as a high priority for his administration.

Chopra also worked to craft public-private partnerships to bring  
technical expertise from firms like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and  
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) inside the walls of government.

Under Chopra's direction, Virginia was one of the first states to  
partner with Google to implement its site-map protocols across the Web  
sites of the state's roughly 90 agencies.

At a Washington policy conference in January, Chopra described the  
challenges of trying to make government data more accessible to the  
public -- in essence doing on a state level what Obama has said he  
would like to see happen across the federal government.

"Open government first and foremost begins with an open and more  
modern IT infrastructure," he said. "We have all this data, we just  
can't mine it, because the information is siloed."

Chopra holds a master's degree in public policy from Harvard and a  
bachelor's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins.

In an address themed around government efficiency and accountability,  
Obama this morning also named Jeffrey Zients as the government's chief  
performance officer, another position created by the administration.  
Obama had previously tapped Nancy Killefer for the job, also  
nominating her as deputy director of the Office of Management and  
Budget, only to see her withdraw her name from consideration after it  
became known that she had failed to pay unemployment taxes for  
household help at her D.C. home.