February 10th, 2009
Who is Obama's tech daddy?
The open letter from open source asking the President for big orders reminds me of a very important question no one has asked lately.
Where is our Chief Technology Officer? Mr. President, who’s your tech daddy? Is it Vivek Kundra, as reported a week ago? Or is it someone else?
The President said during the transition he would appoint a national Chief Technology Officer, charged with crafting a tech strategy for the 21st century. Names were offered. Speculation was made. Magnetic ink was spilled onto screens.
Since January 20, nothing. All quiet on the West Wing front.
It is easy to see how this item got misplaced. Sexier jobs have gone unfilled. (What black hole has Sanjay Gupta gone into? Has Neil deGrasse Tyson demoted him too?)
But the question remains important. Where you stand reveals where you sit. It’s one thing to have Scott McNealy send you a sales letter. It’s something else to give some suit from Microsoft or Oracle or the Google power to bind and loose.
There are also vital tech questions that need to be asked now, starting with how should the VA go about modernizing its computer systems — through the open source VistA process or under a contract to some vendor?
Asking the President to answer such questions right away, when he’s in the middle of wrestling economic alligators, is a little unfair. But he said himself the government should be able to do more than one thing at a time.
And if we knew who the CTO was, we would know a lot more about what our technology future looks like.
So instead of committing to one technology or another, and instead of just praising technology as the answer to all things, can you tell me who your CTO is going to be so I can bother that person?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 02/10/09
