An Agenda for Obama's CTO

The incoming President has a prosaic wish list for his IT czar. Obama needs to adopt practices that work overseas and for business

By Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to appoint the world's first governmental Chief Technology Officer (CTO). On its transition Web site, www.change.gov, the incoming Administration has published a list of goals for the soon-to-be anointed CTO: broadband expansion, boosting science/tech education, health-care computerization, patent reform, and e-government.

The goals are well-intentioned. What is missing is an effective and efficient strategy. So-called "czars" have been appointed for drugs, the war in Iraq, the financial industry, and the auto sector—none of them have worked very well. The Obama team needs to be careful not to reinvent the wheel, focusing instead on technology lessons from the countries that have overtaken the U.S. already, the practices of companies that have top CTOs, and a flexible strategy for implementing policy across the sprawling federal government.

The U.S. may be the first country to have a CTO. That doesn't mean other countries have not put in place effective tech leadership. In the past 28 years, Singapore has had six national plans that have progressively modernized the government infrastructure, starting from computerization of civil services to the current "Intelligent Nation 2015" or iN2015 plan, which in vivid detail envisions a future where every individual and organization has seamless access to technology.

Singapore and Estonia

By comparison, Obama's prosaic wish list is nothing to write home about—but his Administration can learn from Singapore's phased and segmented approach.

Even tiny countries like Estonia have emerged from years behind the Iron Curtain to quickly create e-government infrastructures that would shame the U.S. bureaucracy today. Indeed, Estonia has become an exemplar of e-government, where everyone votes and pays taxes online, not to mention pays parking tickets via mobile phones. The country's image as a leader in tech did suffer a blow, however, when Russian cyberwarriors hacked the government's electronic infrastructure in April 2007, bringing the country to a standstill: Even customers paying for milk and bread in grocery stores suddenly found that their bank cards didn't work. A deeply interconnected technical network is as valuable as it is vulnerable. Estonia is a valuable case study in how to protect oneself from the susceptibility of technology.

Detractors will be quick to say these countries are so small; it's far easier to have broadband penetration among Singapore's 4 million than the 300 million in the U.S. Scale does matter, but if the principles of technology reform are sound, then scalability is a question of time, not of possibility. Even China talks of building an information superhighway for its 1.5 billion citizens. The U.S. should have no less ambitious a goal. In economic theory, modernizing economies experience "catch-up growth" and quick, high returns from emulating and adopting high-technologies. America's CTO—like officials from the United Arab Emirates—should travel widely and send emissaries to gather lessons from others' experiences while taking note of their mistakes.

Digital Natives vs. Immigrants

Government-sponsored innovation is nothing new: The U.S. Defense Dept. created the Internet, and Japan's automobile sector grew according to a conscious government plan before becoming world-beating. But by and large, technology innovation now comes from the private sector, with the government playing catch-up. To paraphrase Marc Prensky's famous terminology, corporations are now "digital natives," while the government is a "digital immigrant," learning the new language of technology but retaining a heavy accent.