Former Federal CIO Presses for Social Government

Former federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, once the greatest proponent of cloud technology in government, has declared victory and moved on. As the information technology vendor Salesforce.com's new executive vice president for emerging markets, Kundra said he's now focused instead on the way social media and social technologies can make governments and industry more efficient, transparent and collaborative.

"Cloud is an old, tired debate," Kundra told Nextgov in an interview Thursday. "It's sort of done. Everyone's moving in that direction. It's a one-way street. The more interesting question is: So now you've abstracted your core infrastructure -- let's say you're in the cloud -- what is the real transformation point? It's not technology for technology's sake. And that's where the social revolution comes in."

Kundra envisions a world where national, state and local governments will post computer code for custom-built applications to do everything from mapping potholes to processing health care data in a collaborative site similar to Salesforce's AppExchange. Technology officials in Chicago can then grab a pothole mapping app from San Francisco, New York or even New Delhi and retrofit it for their own needs without investing in a proprietary system...

Kundra criticized what he called an "IT cartel" during his last months in office," a cadre of major vendors he said pushed the government into proprietary systems that often didn't work as intended and couldn't be easily revised or updated. He sees that cartel breaking down, he said, not because of pressure from the top but because federal employees and Congress are aware of the power of commercial technology and increasingly expect government to use those commercial systems or proprietary systems that function as well...