America's New CIO Loves Google

theodp writes "On Thursday, Barack Obama tapped Vivek Kundra for the post of Federal CIO, giving him responsibility for establishing and overseeing enterprise architecture across the federal government. So what might that look like? Well, little more than a month ago Kundra was slated to sing the praises of Google Apps to government officials in a webcast. A Kundra quote from the presentation slides: 'Why should I spend millions on enterprise apps when I can do it [with Google] at one-tenth cost and ten times the speed? It's a win-win for me.' You can follow Kundra's love affair with Google on YouTube, from his announcement of the Google-Washington DC partnership he brokered through a co-starring role with a Google attorney on a video pitching Google-enabled technology for the Obama Administration. Not surprisingly, some say Obama's choice of a Google-party-goer who worships Google could cause big headaches for Microsoft."

Comments

google running our government IT?

[arkowitz]

I for one have a problem with our government documents and processes being hosted by a private company. At least Microsoft just sells software.

Re:google running our government IT?

[ritcereal]

On the upside, it'd be a lot harder for the Obama administration to misplace millions of e-mails...i mean Google does no evil!

Re:google running our government IT?

[andy1307]

I doubt the IT heads of individual departments are just going to turn over their IT operations to him. In any case, a lot of government documents are hosted by large private sector contractors like Lockheed and EDS.

Re:google running our government IT?

[MistrBlank]

You do realize that Google also licenses out their applications for you to run internally right? Or how about the fact that even government applications experience outtages, it's not like the hardware they purchase is magically protected by a "never goes down" forcefield. Google as an entity isn't going anywhere and you can't call a business a single point of failure, trust me, their infrastructure is well built to sustain multiple failure. Better yet, I would prefer if our government leveraged Google's superior and private workforce and farm of server hardware that has proven itself than try to build the infrastructure from the ground up. Particularly if in 4 years or 8 years when the administration changes all of that work setting it up prefers to go with M$ exchange or Zimbra, or Netscape Mail, or Lotus, etc.

I work in government IT. Government doesn't have the buying power to hire the trained workstaff to set up an infrastructure like this reliably. I would prefer they "outsource" to Google.

In other words, shut the hell up because you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:google running our government IT?

[Philip K Dickhead]

Hi. I'm from Google, and I'm here to help you.

Re:google running our government IT?

[digitalgiblet]

What makes you think it will be out in the open just because it is hosted by Google?

Just because it is POSSIBLE to be out in the open, doesn't mean that it will.

I agree with your sentiment that we need a more transparent government, but I disagree that using Google will necessarily achieve that.

I use Google every day and have seen no reason to suspect they are up to no good, but it makes me a bit nervous when I see that people seem to trust them completely.

They are a large, powerful corporation. Even if the current management proves to be saintly, a corporation can change its management. Sometimes against the will of the current management (I'm looking at YOU Yahoo).

Having the government's information held by a private corporation seems a bit dangerous.

Cheaper, definitely. More transparent, maybe. Good idea, remains to be seen...

I certainly hope that if the govt. really goes down that road, that the process by which they do so is absolutely transparent.

Really well written contracts (and possibly legislative actions) need to spell out EXACTLY what Google can and can't do. It could be implemented very well or very badly. AND there needs to be a fall back. It may be unthinkable for Google to fail, but not that long ago people thought the same of GM, AIG, Citigroup, etc, etc...

Re:google running our government IT?

[Danathar]

Really? Uh..it's been done for close to 40 years. The government has been using offsite contrators with mainframes and servers at corporate locations since the 60's.

What's the fuss? Google is a contractor like any other out there that deals with the government and has to abide by the same rules. Your data is as safe with google as it is with any other contractor that works onsite or offsite with the government.

Re:google running our government IT?

[Rary]

Reliability is not the problem. A private company handling documents is. ... If they decide to buy the apps from Google AND they are open source, great. But somehow I doubt that.

Read the presentation linked to in TFS. He specifically talks about using Google appliances for internal stuff — meaning it's nicely hidden away from the public and from Google — and using Google-hosted applications for documents that are supposed to be publicly accessible — meaning the public has greater access to information.

Finally someone who gets it

[oodaloop]

I work in the intelligence community, and I have to say we are way behind the commercial side in application development and other IT areas. We spend millions in development of programs that can't begin to match free programs available on the internet like Google Earth. Open Source to us means unclassified information; hardly anyone is aware of Linux, Open Office, or other open source solutions. Having someone who is not beholden to government contractors can only be a good thing. And I say that as a government contractor.

Re:Finally someone who gets it

[oodaloop]

Well, about 13 years ago, when I joined the community, we were way ahead. Our networks and applications were robust, and nothing on the internet could compare to what we had. All of our research was done on our classified networks; tryig to find something useful on the internet then was hopeless. But our slow acquisition and testing process held us back as the internet and commercial applications grew at a dizzying pace. Now with web 2.0 and the like, we're trying to play catch-up. We started Intellipedia (wikipedia for intel subjects) on our classified networks, but these days a lot of our basic research is done on the internet.

A lot of the complaints from other posters so far are about Google owning the govt's data, but that's not necessarily true. We can take their applications, like Google Earth as an example, and run it on our classified networks without Google seeing any of our data.

Re:Do you even have to ask?

[oodaloop]

We already use Google Earth on our classified networks, quite extensively actually. The kml is quickly becoming the file type of choice for geospatial information, replacing the shapefile (shp) used in ArcGIS.

What's to stop us from using some of their other applications as well?

He should be Fired

[CSHARP123]

Why is he talking about saving money. This is the time we need to be thinking about spending. We are proposing a trillion plus dollar budget and this guy is talking about win-win situation. Tax payers have lot of money. As soon as you get to a govt position where you have some decision on spending, you need to start treating Tax payers as ATM machines. That should be the litmus test for becoming a govt. employee. This CIO seems to fail in that regard. I ask all of you call your representatives and senators to push for firing of this guy. Thank you all and God Bless the USA.

Why is everyone so worried...

[jhfry]

It seems every third comment is along the lines of... "do we really want our data on a private companies servers?"

Get a clue, what this guy might do is switch the government to government owned servers running google software. Right now, my email, on the DHS network, is pulled from an exchange server... MS does not own the server. The great thing about google's code is that it would scale much better than anyone else's, eliminate the need for client software on individual workstations, and prevent users from storing mail locally on their machines (archive pst's) as is so commonly done now with the tiny mailboxes and huge attachments that inexperienced users are so fond of sending around here. Because each exchange server has it's own mail store, an attachment could exist on every mail server in our organization... while on google, an attachment is stored very efficiently and only on multiple servers for redundancy purposes.

My vote is for google code on government owned equipment... it would be by far the most efficient and cost effective solution.

Oh good

[Lord Bitman]

I'm okay with Google just taking over the whole government, really. They seem to run things pretty well. Hell, scrap income taxes and make it all add-supported.

Re:Linux users are steers and queers

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Ballmer, is that you?