Vivek Kundra Names The Nation's First Chief Information Officer

Here's what President Obama said in the press release announcing the appointment:

"Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position. I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible."

Obama also plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) who will work closely with Kundra. That is a totally new position, and its unclear how the two positions will interact. However, Kundra made the following comments in a conference call:

So, the CTO will be named in due time by the President, but what I can talk about is my role in terms of the Federal CIO role. The Federal CIO role is going to be largely focused on

3. we want to look at the innovative path in terms of leveraging innovations that are happening whether is it in the private sector or in the NGO community and applying them to the federal government and changing the velocity with which we adopt new technologies.

Many are touting Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco and former CTO of Motorola for the CTO position. But as I said, she basically oversaw the dismantling of Motorola as a force in mobile phones. So I wouldn't necessary be a big fan of that, but with Kundra getting the CIO position, it seems pretty inevitable, as the two were noted as finalists for the CTO position.

Kundra stated that one of his first projects will be to data.gov Web site to "democratize" the federal government's vast information stores. This falls into the category of openness in government, something Obama promised during the campaign.

Data.gov will publish data feeds, so we'll have a vast array of data, and the way I like to think about this is that if you think of two forms of data that have been published in the federal government that have fundamentally transformed the economy. One example is the National Institute of Health working with other world bodies when they published the Human Genome Project data online. What that did is it created an entire revolution in personalized medicine where you ended up having over 500 drugs that were created and that are in the pipeline coming into the FDA.

In the same way, in the same spirit, there is a lot of data that the federal government has and what we need to do is, we need to make sure that all that data that is not private that is not restricted for national security reasons can be made public. And the question we should be thinking about even when it comes to FOIA is how do we begin with the default assumption that we put information out in the public domain then the second question is what needs to be private rather than the other way around.

As you probably recall, Obama used technology to his advantage during the Presidential campaign, using Twitter, SMS, the Internet and more. It's good to see a focus on technology in his administration as well.