In a conversation at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit this afternoon, Vivek Kundra (above) talked about the challenges he faced as the first federal chief information officer, a post he held from 2009 to 2011.
"It felt like you were inheriting the Middle Ages of technology," he said, noting that government was the center of technology innovation in the 1960s, but that center moved to multinational enterprises in the 1980s and to the consumer Web in around 2005.
The federal government controls $80 billion in IT spending, but Kundra recalled his first day when he was handed a stack of PDF printouts representing $27 billion in projects that were years behind schedule.
So how did Kundra fight this? His greatest asset, he said, was his naiveté about the government process. He told Congress that within the next 60 days he would create an IT dashboard that would let citizens see where their tax dollars are spent, so he put up a site with the picture of every CIO in the federal government, along with the costs, schedule, and outcome of every major project. This made many of the individual CIOs unhappy but within a week one agency had halted 45 projects and killed four of them. Overall, he said, this process found $3 billion in savings within three months.
Government IT facilities have grown from about 400 in 1998 to more than 2,000 in 2009 and Kundra discussed the need to rationalize all the growth. This didn't happen for political reasons, but rather because it was just easy to set up a new center to support new applications.
One example of a success: a student aid form with hundreds of questions that students were failing to fill out properly. The IRS had much of the data, but legally was not allowed to share it with the Department of Education. The simple solution, he said, was a small application that let students download their IRS data into the BOE form, filling 70 of the questions.
CIOs have a choice in how they handle innovation, Kundra said. They can embrace it or become "Dr. No." He discovered government employees bypass the CIO by using services such as Dropbox. We're entering a new era with new computing model, he said, so he has instituted a "cloud first" computing policy.
Kundra is now Salesforce.com's vice president of emerging markets, which he clarified means markets that are emerging for the company, not emerging markets generally. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Japan, and even Haiti are adopting cloud first policies, he said, though for different reasons.
The big emphasis in IT, both in government and in business, has been on back office operations, he noted, but the average user has been waiting in line for information. Every CIO now has to start thinking about business values, generating revenue, and how to fundamentally change the business they are in.
In particular, he talked about how social networks especially are driving all companies to become more customer-centric. In his new role at Salesforce, conversations with customers typically now have the CIO in the room, but the discussion is driven by the business side.
Asked about privacy and security, Kundra said it all comes down to transparency. He suggested that privacy policies should be simplified.
If he returned to government knowing what he knows now, he said he would work closer with Congress earlier on since it takes so long to get laws passed. That is not really because of partisan issues, he said, but just because it takes time. He also would implement quarterly performance measures on each part of the IT process, similar to the way public companies report quarterly.
Kundra explained that governments are natural monopolies so they can afford to stay in business with old practices but businesses can't. The biggest question every business faces, he said, is whether the organization is facing extinctionbecoming a Borders in the face of Amazon, or a Blockbuster in the face of Netflix.
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