For Release Sunday, March 15, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — His reputation has been as a whirling dervish pushing government departments toward more efficient, economical computer systems. A lead advocate for making most government data public — and as instantly as possible. Proponent of a “digital public square” for great government accountability.
Vivek Kundra, at age 34, was seen as all those things as Washington, D.C.’s chief technology officer. A leap ahead of any other city government in the nation, Tundra began to break the “we know best” attitudes of the bureaucracy by providing the public with 240 real-time data feeds, focused on areas as varied as zoning permits, health care, potholes and crime incidents.
But then Kundra got a new job. President Obama appointed him to a White House post as the federal government’s Chief Information Officer. His task: to direct federal technology investments to improve the performance and lower the cost of government operations.
Awkwardly, a few days later, Kundra was obliged to go on leave from the new job because of an FBI raid on his old D.C. office, a mid-level official there arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery on procurement orders. Officials said Kundra was not personally implicated, and the White House said that he had been placed on leave out of “an abundance of caution.”
Assuming he gets fully cleared and returns to active duty, he’ll have a daunting job. Federal agencies are spending some $71 billion yearly on technology, and there have been instances of big-contract boondoggles and hiring of contractors who — in Kundra’s words — often end up “on the payroll indefinitely.”
Kundra’s basic cure: sunlight. “There’s very little government does that needs to be locked up, sealed, behind closed doors,” he insists. He believes the best efficiency — and the best democracy — will be achieved by running “an open, transparent, participatory and collaborative government.”
The Obama administration was already pledged to move this way. Prime evidence: the recovery.gov website’s “don’t trust us–track us” approach to all funds flowing under the new stimulus legislation, allowing watchdog groups, taxpayer groups, even everyday citizens to go online and examine how the money’s being spent.
But can openness trump that natural caution of federal departments in which — as Kundra puts it — “process has trumped outcome,” and officials are too easily focused “on compliance, not innovation”?
It will be a struggle. But Obama and Kundra will have some tools. Instead of letting agencies automatically opt for in-house, proprietary or custom computer programming systems, they’ll be encouraged — as Kundra has done in the District — to adapt off-the-shelf technologies from firms like Google.
In a major D.C. procurement process — in this case a new evidence warehouse for police — Kundra persuaded officials to use elements of software from Wikipedia, You-Tube and Google to run an interactive website with video feeds. In place of reams of paper and time delays, the process went rapidly, with contractors asking questions, officials clearly defining and redefining the government’s needs, and bids coming in electronically.
David Stephenson, a lead expert in public digital technology and author of a forthcoming book, “Democratizing Data” (O’Reilly Media), cites Kundra’s insistence for strict accountability on the success — or problems — of new information technology systems that agencies adopt.
Stephenson noted that in Kundra’s D.C. office, he had mounted big displays with real time data gauging each major project as if it were a stock. The displayed showed spending, goals, dates, milestones, what’s been accomplished, including indication of the client agency’s satisfaction. The clear message: lagging projects would be terminated, or restructured.
Can such approaches actually lead to a new form and image of government, making it more a “we,” less a “they” as Obama envisions? The mission is a daunting one.
But clues for rejuvenating federal service come from Kundra’s approaches for Washington. One is allowing citizens to access, immediately, the same data government has, so they can process (“slice and dice”) the information, including a “mashup” to other data and Internet sources, according to the individual user’s needs and interests. It’s tough to be a distant bureaucrat when citizens have as much relevant information as you do.
Second, Kundra talks of every government employee as a knowledge worker: a person with whom agency data is shared virtually daily, and who — as a member of a team with coworkers as teammates — is encouraged to apply the data immediately in tackling tasks.
So this isn’t all geek stuff — it’s also about basic motivations, performance, and expecting the best of employees. As high finance jobs evaporate and government payrolls expand, it could be a long-missing incentive for highly talented youth to go into federal service.
What’s refreshing is that Kundra actually believes that open government, a totally informed citizenry, is integral to what America stands for. He was born in India, raised in Tanzania with Swahili as his first language. He came to this country at age 11, and thinks so much of his adopted country that he and his wife were married at the new Constitution Center in Philadelphia. It’s sad his rise has been thwarted for the moment; he (and we) will be lucky once he returns.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
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