Kundra Had Vision, Next Federal CIO Needs Speed

When federal CIO Vivek Kundra leaves his post for Harvard in mid-August, he will leave behind a comprehensive, long-term plan for federal IT reform that has only begun to be implemented. Kundra's replacement will have to hit the ground running to execute on that strategy. Kundra himself has said as much.

But it won't be easy. As the nation's first official federal CIO, Kundra had the luxury of coming in to a new administration with a mandate to drive change in federal IT, which led to top-down initiatives from open government to cloud computing to data center consolidation. In a congressional hearing last week, Kundra said his naivety about federal IT was his greatest asset in the early going because it allowed him to ask simple questions and think big.

Naivety won't be an asset for the next federal CIO. Kundra's successor doesn't get to start from square one. He or she will inherit works in progress in the middle of a presidential term, in the thick of a budget cycle that brings pressure from all sides, and a federal IT workforce that's feeling the strain of having to do too much with limited resources.