Obama's CTO: List is long for candidate tasked with mapping the nation's technology future
William Atkinson, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/23/2008 5:15:00 PM
|
Back in November 2007, around the time he visited Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., president-elect Barack Obama unveiled his technology plan. One of the elements of the plan was to appoint a chief technology officer (CTO).
The CTO's mandate would be different than that of the cyber-security czar appointed under the Bush Administration. Obama's CTO would have significantly broader and deeper responsibilities.
According to the Obama Web site: "Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices."
In sum, the general function of the CTO seeks cooperation between different agencies to share best practices and live up to the goal of creating a more transparent government—one that digitizes and enhances access to government records, and improves network security. There has been some discussion as to whether the CTO also will take over federal cyber-security, or whether a separate cyber-security chief would be appointed.
Contenders for Obama’s “tech czar” have been bandied about for several months (see MBT poll results on the subject
). The high-tech roster includes, in alpha order: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer; Alan Balutis, past director of NIST and a distinguished fellow at Cisco; Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon.com; Vint Cerf of Google;Oracle’s Larry Ellison; Ed Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton; Microsoft’s Bill Gates; Bob Gourley, CTO of CrucialPoint and former CTO for the Defense Intelligence Agency; Danny Hills, inventor, Applied Minds; Bill Joy, cofounder, Sun Microsystems; Dawn Meyerriecks, Washington consultant and former CTO of Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA); Harry Raduege, Jr., past director of DISA, now chair of the Deloitte Center for Network Innovation; and Shane Robison, CTO of Hewlett-Packard, formerly with AT&T.
While the list is impressive, questions remain regarding just how high up in the government the position will reside, and the implications for technology in general.
Leah Jamieson, Ph.D., the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering, Purdue University, and 2007 president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has been following the CTO appointment issue carefully.
"Early on,” says Jamieson, “there were discussions about it being a cabinet post. There was a lot of excitement about this in the tech community."
Since then, she maintains, there has been less discussion about the appointment, so it is difficult to say where it stands.
"Some in the media say we are nearing the end of cabinet appointments,” says Jamieson. "Certainly, though, there are a lot of us in the tech community who would be pleased if it were a cabinet-level position because of the bold statement it would make."
So the question is, who should be selected?
"Clearly, it should be someone who epitomizes the forward-looking entrepreneurial, innovative, and optimistic view of technology," replies Jamieson. "I have said in the past that this is an operational office—that it will make things happen." The person leading it, she adds, must have a feel for what technology can mean and what it can do. "It should be someone who is a visionary and an entrepreneur—someone who epitomizes innovation," says Jamieson.
The second attribute, she believes, is someone who is collaborative. "It is a new position, and it touches on so many other things," she explains. "It should be someone who will approach this as an opportunity to serve many other parts of the government, to serve industry, and to serve education by improving our overall infrastructure."
And while the position is designed primarily to manage government technology, Dr. Jamieson believes there will an impact on the private sector.
"The government is such a large user of technology that a forward-looking embracing of the power of technology at the federal government level will naturally intersect and interact with what happens in the private sector," she explains. "There are many of us who would hope that, while it would start with looking at the role of technology in government, it would broaden fairly quickly to consider the opportunities for technology for the country as a whole to eventually address national and global challenges."
• Protect the openness of the Internet
• Encourage diversity in media ownership
• Protect our children while preserving the First Amendment
• Safeguard our right to privacy
• Open up government to its citizens
• Bring government into the 21st Century
• Deploy next-generation broadband
• Promote American businesses abroad
• Invest in the sciences
• Invest in university-based research
• Make the R&D tax credit permanent
• Ensure competitive markets
• Protect American intellectual property at home and abroad
• Reform the patent system
• Restore scientific integrity to the White House
• Make math and science education a national priority
• Improve and prioritize science assessments
• Address the dropout crisis
• Pinpoint college aid for math and science students
• Increase math and science graduates
• Invest in climate-friendly energy development and deployment
• Modernize public safety networks
• Advance the biomedical research field
Read more here.
-
I'd like to see Bezos or Ellison take the position. I feel either would do much better than the...
Wil Moore III - 2009-23-6 07:22:37
Inventory solution with ROI guarantee
11/01/2001Obama's budget: ready for cap & trade?
02/26/2009Create and manage
07/01/2002
