Vivek Kundra is the administrator for e-government and IT at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and carries the additional title of Chief Information Officer (CIO). He’s been making the rounds of pretty much all of the conferences, including IMRCO, which concluded Wednesday. And now Aneesh Chopra will be chief technology officer. He’s not within OMB but rather is positioned as a White House advisor.

 

At the IRMCO late-night bar scene and in the hallways between sessions, people are speculating about who will actually implement policy. The predecessor to Kundra during the Bush administration, Karen Evans, had been a Federal CIO, knew what it was like from within a department or agency, and so was an effective, if sometimes a bit stern, taskmaster over carrying out a variety of technology policies such as the Federal Core Desktop Configuration. Kundra, though he is articulate and knows the lingo of the Web 2.0 era, still has to show he can relate to experienced Federal managers by demonstrating his understanding that this ain’t the District of Columbia.

 

Chopra clearly has the broader governmental experience from a big state, but he’s not at the operational level. Kundra, though, has a deputy who, like Evans, grew up by moving up and through the Federal machinery. Mike Howell, who moved into the deputy job when it was designated as career last year, comes across as confident and forceful. In the opening IRMCO session of high level career OMB and Office of Personnel Management types, he talked about how something basic – the content change system for OMB’s Web site – had been overhauled to where changes take hours instead of days or weeks. The tone seemed to be, “and folks, you better figure out how to do this too.”

 

Kundra at this point is still a bit enigmatic to the CIOs and program managers. He is repeating the themes of cloud computing – a buying vehicle for which is said to be in development – and the planned data.gov Web site. Both are knotty.

 

Cloud computing carries security, control, and cost issues that few Feds feel have been settled. And data.gov will impose on agencies standards (such as taxonomies for information) and procedures (such as how, precisely, they feed in their data) that most aren’t fully equipped to meet.