The nation now has a tentative CIO,
finally. Vivek Kundra was born in India, grew to a tween in Tanzania,
and has spent the last few years working hard to clean up Washington
D.C.'s woeful IT situation.
I'd never heard of the fellow until today,
but it certainly sounds like he's the right man for the job. After
doing a bit of research, I see that Kundra has built all sorts of
cool applications for D.C., including live snow-plow trackers and live
crime reporters, and he has a non-stop love of Twitter.
It's about time this nation got a
single overarching leader for its information policies. We still
need a CTO, as well, but this is a great start. Kundra is young
enough to “get it” and old enough to have experience with
implementing new ideas in staid old-school agencies.
Hats off to our president for finally
establishing technology as a primary tool of government. It sounds
like Kundra will also be giving us APIs into government data! Incidentally, Kundra is the one on the right.