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Obama Appoints Non-Tech Guy As CTO

Posted by Soulskill on from the jesse-ventura's-political-return dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "President Barack Obama has named his chief technology officer, and the appointee is not a Silicon Valley name like so many predicted. He is Aneesh Chopra. As the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, his job has been to 'leverage technology in government reform, promote Virginia's innovation agenda, and foster technology-related economic development with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship.' But Chopra's not a tech guy. Before he got his secretary job in 2005, he was a managing director at the Advisory Board Company, a public-market health care think tank, as well as an angel investor." O'Reilly Radar is running an article discussing why Chopra is a good choice for federal CTO.

13 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Open Source Alternatives by micromegas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What is his stance on the open source revolution? Linux/Open Office/Open Source solutions can contribute to massive savings for school districts but it's been beaten down/back by those with financial interests.

    1. Re:Open Source Alternatives by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 2, Interesting

      he doesn't need to be a geek so long as he has the right geeks working for him

      Is that really true? I'm a lawyer. No way on God's green earth would I work under the supervision of a non-lawyer.

      --
      Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
    2. Re:Open Source Alternatives by samriel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The purpose of a school is NOT to teach students how things work right now, but how they will work in the future. How do you know that OSS won't become more accepted, if not the norm, in tomorrow's industry? Your Linux conspiracy theories are just as bad as anti-MS ones.

      FOAD AC.

    3. Re:Open Source Alternatives by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Don't you work for non-lawyers all the time? They defer to you because you -are- a lawyer, but I think you might have to rescind your comment :) I do IT, and not everyone in the chain of command knows more than I do about IT. They do know more about other things, like management, or sales, or marketing. My job in IT is to enable them to do their jobs, and so I have to know a little bit about their job, and they have to know a little bit about mine, but that's all. If we were to live in some upside down world where we demanded everyone paying us had to know more about what we're doing than we do, no one would get anything done. Why are they paying you if they know more than you? And this applies to you too, Ray. Your clients pay you, or your firm, or however you have it set up, and they don't know nearly as much as you do. If they did, they wouldn't be paying you.

      My clients pay me; they do not "supervise" me. When I did work under supervision (1974-1983) it was the supervision of people who did exactly what I did but had been doing it longer. That is the only kind of supervision I could accept. It was one of the main reasons I went into a "profession".

      I consider information technology a profession, and entitled to the same level of respect and dignity. If you know what you are doing and have someone "supervising" who doesn't fully grasp what is going on, and doesn't understand where you are coming from, it is degrading, insulting, and counterproductive.

      --
      Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
    4. Re:Open Source Alternatives by he-sk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Really? You want to waste the student's time by teaching them the diff between Open Office and Microsoft Office? Perhaps with 5-year-old textbooks? I'll bet your students will be super excited! Not.

      Why not teach them the difference between Photoshop and Gimp? That, at least, would have been useful for me, because as an amateur photographer I kinda got sucked into PS and now it's keeping me from switching back to Linux from OS X. Wait, there was no GIMP when I was in school. /sarcasm

      --
      Free Manning, jail Obama.
    5. Re:Open Source Alternatives by Zancarius · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So because he is of Indian descent he must have a particular point of view? There is a name for that sort of prejudgement: Racism.

      I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to make assumptions that people of certain cultural, ethnic, or national backgrounds are more likely to hold specific views. If someone made the assumption that I would be more lenient toward Australians (I'm American), they might be right: Part of my heritage is Australian. Would I consider it racist if someone speculated about my leniency toward Aussies? Of course not. Let's put it another way: Would I be offended if someone assumed that my own heritage meant I would be more likely to consider importing Vegemite into the United States as a policy position? Not at all.

      The reason people make such assumptions is largely because they are correct; we are often a little more "fair" toward people we can better identify with. Go to a Mexican restaurant (run by individuals who are authentically Hispanic--not those crummy knock-off big chain restaurants) and tell me if the owners might be a little more friendly and outgoing to someone who speaks Spanish; Go to a German establishment and see if the owners are a little more friendly and outgoing to someone who speaks German.

      It's unfortunate that making general assumptions about a person's ideology based upon their cultural background is considered racist. Sometimes those assumptions can be helpful, such as with personal space: Arabs tend to stand much closer together when talking in the company of friends of associates--distances that we Westerners are not altogether comfortable with. It is not racist, then, to assume that someone who is Arab may stand closer to you when they're talking! In fact, you might offend them if you fail to oblige (and back away, maintaining your "personal" space)!

      It is not racist to consider that someone whose family may or may not be relatively new immigrants to the US might be a little more open to certain immigration-related activities. In fact, I'd expect it; if they weren't, I'd be worried!

      --
      He who has no .plan has small finger. ~ Confucius on UNIX
  2. I'm really curious.... by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    about this. My first reaction was that it was wrong not to appoint a technologist as CTO. Then I read O'Reilly's article, which argues cogently that the appointment makes a lot of sense.

    O'Reilly is someone for whom I have respect.

    I'm really really curious about what the Slashdot community has to say on this.

    Usually I'm writing on legal issues, which I know something about.

    But I am not a technologist, and I have no expertise in government or in policy.

    --
    Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
    1. Re:I'm really curious.... by Quothz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      about this. My first reaction was that it was wrong not to appoint a technologist as CTO. Then I read O'Reilly's article, which argues cogently that the appointment makes a lot of sense.

      This guy is a sensible choice, but perhaps not the best one. On one hand, he clearly is a technophile; he's had some nifty ideas and isn't afraid to hear new ones.

      On the other hand, he seems to very much be a politician first and a technologist second. The video embedded in O'Reilly's commentary is telling: in the first four minutes, he uses the word "humbled", passively, five times. He can't resist buzzwords: "begin a conversation for dialogue" indeed. And if I hear him say "long-term strategic roadmap" one more time I'm'a puke.

      So... I dunno. He looks good on paper, but he makes me want to scrub my brain after listening to him. He probably is a good choice for getting Obama's nationalized healthcare records system up and running. In other technology issues, I'm'a go out on a limb and predict that he'll turn out to be a fast-talking mouthpiece with very little real impact.

  3. non-tech Chief Technology Officer by viralMeme · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've seen this at a lot of organizations, the CIO is invariable a non-techie hired on for his skills at schmoozing management than any tech knowledge. Management find real techies a threat as they might get found out. They mostly spend their time quoting the tech press and spouting phrases like 'integrated innovation' and 'empowerment'. The top man specifically hires people dumber then him, else they could be as threat to his job. In turn the CTO hires someone even dumber than he is, and so on down the line. If something 'technical' comes along they hire in a 'consultant', fire him and take credit for his work. Of course any real in-house techies have to be transferred before they figure out just how stupid the CIO really is. So you end up with a business where the longest serving employee has been there less then ten months. Eventually the company goes down the tubes ...

  4. Re:Bag of Air Says What by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm gonna reform copyright. The laws are faulty.

    - Let me fill the DOJ with RIAA lawyers.

    The current tech laws need reform.

    - Let me appoint another windbag politician to do it instead of someone who actually knows what the hell bittorrent is.

    That was my initial reaction. But O'Reilly makes a cogent contrary argument. What is flawed in what O'Reilly is saying?

    --
    Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
  5. Re:Bag of Air Says What by Jonas+Buyl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    - Let me appoint another windbag politician to do it instead of someone who actually knows what the hell bittorrent is.

    People in charge aren't supposed to know everything, that's why they have advisors. A techie as CTO will get lost in details and won't be able to think outside the box or will probably be too biased (e.g. Windows vs. Linux) and won't make a fair judgement. What we need is a bright leader and I believe that's what he is.

  6. Good Choice by waldoj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I worked with Aneesh earlier this year on an open government project here in Virginia. He asked me to function in a very small role in developing stimulus.virginia.gov, basically to serve as a programmer/open government guy to advocate from the inside for increased openness and strong adherence to public, open data exchange standards on the website and its API. Aneesh isn't a geek, but he "gets it," if I may return to that old chestnut that we all employed round about 2000. He might not know Unicode from Latin 1, but he surrounds himself with people who do know the difference, he gets the gist of it from them, and chooses the path that provides the most accessibility for the most data to the most people.

    The guy is, incidentally, utterly exhausting to try to keep up with. I'm somebody to whom people say constantly "when do you sleep?", and even I find Aneesh an absolutely whirlwind of activity.

    The only downside for me here is that Aneesh had expressed interested in me joining Governor Kaine's cabinet as "Senior Advisor for Open Government" (or something like that). I'd been in talks with my employer about taking a leave of absence. Now, of course, that won't happen. But since the (apparent) tradeoff is having Aneesh as the nation's CTO, that's A-OK by me.

  7. From Virginia... by ukyoCE · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know how much Aneesh is responsible for, but I've been pleasantly surprised by my home state's technology initiatives. We do pretty much everything online these days - DMV, property values, utilities, car taxes.

    A number of years back the virginia state government charged you an extra ~$10 to make payments online, compared to sending the same credit card number to them in the mail to be processed by hand. That nonsense is long gone, thankfully.