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Should the United States' New CTO Really Be a CIO?
CurtMonash writes "Barack Obama promised to appoint the United States' first Chief Technology Officer. Naturally, the blogosphere is full of discussion as to who that should be. I favor American Management Systems founder and former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti. Richard Koman thinks it should be one of the better state CTOs. John Doerr, going in a different direction, thinks it should be his partner Bill Joy. We can bandy names back and forth all month, but first a more fundamental question needs to be answered: What do we need most — a get-things-done CIO (Chief Information Officer), or a more visionary true CTO? I think it's a CIO, and based on his campaign statements it appears Obama agrees. Management of government IT is a huge, generally unsolved problem, and we need somebody deeply experienced to have a fighting chance. Of course, that doesn't preclude recruiting a visionary CTO in addition, but the highest priority is a CIO. What do you think?"
Everyone else will be a corporate shill more interested in funneling money back to their own products.
Which is exactly the kind of person who will be appointed. You don't really buy the 'new politics' crap do you? Lobbyists and high level corporate officers will remain the pool from which most appointments are drawn.
Linus doesn't line anyone's pockets in Washington.
My father has worked for AMS for the past 20+ years on a number of government contracts. The one thing he always comes back saying is how screwed up and redundant a lot of the setups are--it's layer upon layer of hackjobs just to get the various systems to talk to one another. Rossotti is well aware of the current state of technology affairs within the government.
Money is at the crux of this issue, in two ways:
1) The government often is unwilling or unable to invest in the type of infrastructure they really need.
2) Unless the CTO *really* controls all the various agencies IT budget the CTO will be powerless. Agencies will listen nicely and nod their collective heads; then do whatever the want to because it's their money, not the CTO's.
1 can be fixed with a well thought out plan and budget; 2 will take real change and radically alter the power structure. I doubt that will happen. Trying to do so will accomplish one of the hardest things in DC - getting agency's to put aside their turf fights and unite to defeat a common enemy; in this case the CTO.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Oh, fully agreed that it won't be easy, and may in fact be impossible. But I think having someone who's already well-versed in where things currently stand is a good place to start.
This guy's the limit!
RMS might not be the choice, but it should be someone with vision. Tech should not be about record companies suing customers to maintain an outdated business model, stupid software and business process patents, paranoid monitoring of citizens, outsourcing jobs to cheaper countries, etc. CIOs seem to promote such things.
We need to get back to kids being excited about tech, folks in a garage or dorm room creating a product, the Internet being a fun place, etc. Bill Joy seems to be more in line with this. Some CIO or whatever from a company that just kluges together overpriced systems doesn't seem very enlightened to me.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
For such a CTO you need to make sure they are NOT just a information technology person - the real growth areas for the future are all outside IT. You need someone with a broad viewpoint and the ability to see the connections across widely varying areas. You also need them to be able to see consequences and how things will play out in future. An IT person is probably one of the worst picks you could make, too myopic.
Also remember that he has relatively little experience in Washington, and to get things done in Washington he is going to need people with contacts and context in that environment. Most good presidents are really good presidents because they know everything and know how to do everything, it's because they surrounded themselves with people who collectively knew all the things they needed to know. One of those things they need to know is how to get things done in Washington.
That's something that may be of particular importance depending on how the Democrats in Congress want to try and use him. They may be under the impression that he is their new young puppet. It will be interesting to see.
What a long winded and rambling question that really tries to play up the essentially artificial distinction between a CTO and a CIO, two abstract titles that are not particularly informative with respect to what the holders actually do. Most of the distinction seams manufactured by these same people to justify their titles.
That said, it would not be surprising that I suspect it would ultimately be a hybrid CTO/CIO.
Nobody lined Obama's pockets except me and thirty million of my fellow Americans, 25 bucks at a time. Can't you cynics keep it to a dull roar for even the two months it'll take to get him sworn in? Wait and see what happens.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Well, actually, we don't know that for sure. Obama's web donations campaign turned off ther fraud check name validation on the credit cards which meant that not only were they were perfectly happy accepting a donation on a credit card owned by Joe Six Pack under the name Joe Q Public, they went through specific trouble to make it possible.
You may believe the hype, you might even be wanting to perpetuate it. But there are simple facts about obama or his campaign team that don't completely hold water. And this isn't even starting to go into the business of the foreign donations and all. If you cared to know anything about that, you can easily do a google search and find stories on them. Simply look for "Obama turned off credit card fraud detections" and "foreigners donating to Obama"
BTW, this claim that he raised most of his money from private contributors isn't an accurate representation when he didn't verify who was sending him money. It simply can't be as one report found out, with the credit card fraud stuff disabled, he was able to donate $20- ten times in different names all of which contained the letters Barack Obama spelled in different ways. It will take years for the FEC to sort that out but it shows a picture that people should at least be questioning.
Claiming that no pac or corporate or foreign money was donated simply because you stopped checking where the source of the money came from does not make it true. In fact, I'm not sure how you can even make the claim after you stopped checking where the money was coming from.
Although it'd be nice to believe that a socialist poltician got his money from the masses, it's not true. Obama's pockets were lined by George Soros's MoveOn.org, . Do some searches like 'obama campaign finance fraud' and 'obama foreign donations'.
Boy there are sooo many things wrong with this statement.
First, though I would like it if Obama really was a socialist he isn't. He isn't even close. Anyone who believes that a progressive income tax is socialism has no understanding of what socialism is.
Next, George Soros is a dyed in the wool capitalist. He would not support a real socialist candidate.
Next, Move On does not belong to George Soros. It is controlled by a small cabal of people that could be characterized as "progressive democrats." What is special about MoveOn, is that they were really the first organization that really leveraged some effective techniques for on-line organizing and on-line fund raising. They were in the right position to tap into the very deep current of disgust at the Bush policies. They are also not very democratically controlled, and often make dumb tactical mistakes.
Last, drinking the Fox news cool-aid that typically leads to the kinds of irrational thinking displayed above, also causes bigotry, irrational fears, and eventually permanent brain damage. You really ought to lay off that stuff and pick a safer recreational drug like sniffing gasoline or mainlining speedballs.
-- QED
See, now you're way off in tinfoil hat-land. I never said that Obama or his campaign did any of that; I said that the bank did. Your alternative theory, that Obama turned off fraud protection so that foreign donors could use his donation page to launder money, is absurd, mainly because that's a ridiculously inefficient and conspicuous way to launder money and the fraud protection wouldn't have stopped it anyways. I mean, come on; you think someone is going to create thousands of bank accounts so that he can donate $20 from each one, and that no one would notice thousands of bank accounts all receiving funds from a single source and sending them to the same destination, but that in order to do so he needed Obama to disable a system designed to prevent the use of stolen credit cards? You, my friend, have observed two dots, and concluded that they must be the eyes of a T-Rex. You should try connecting them instead.