An Agenda for Obama's CTO

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Who might assume the CTO role? Among the reported contenders are Hewlett-Packard CTO Shane Robison; Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf; and Vivek Kundra, CTO of Washington, D.C. But plucking a well-known executive as the government's tech guru will not substitute for continuous public-private collaboration to ensure that innovations are adapted to the government setting. Areas where discussions would be especially useful range from building energy-efficient infrastructures such as green data centers and cloud computing to providing citizens online government services using Web 2.0 technologies.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched an aggressive "customer-oriented government" initiative, led by Paul Cosgrave, CIO of the city's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT). In order to tackle poverty, the DoITT worked with Accenture (ACN) and Irish software company Cúram Software to roll out ACCESS NYC, a free online service that prescreens individuals anonymously and provides information on their eligibility for 21 different city, state, and federal programs. Consolidating the screening and application process for a range of programs into one online tool saves time and money for all involved, notably needy individuals.

Obama's education and health-care priorities for the CTO cannot simply be parceled out to various departments and agencies. The Administration will need to adopt an approach that can be spread across the government—using, for example, a so-called service-oriented architecture that would let the Administration roll out applications independently but using a common set of standards.

Visas and Green Cards

This approach would have helped avoid past mistakes. Take the disaster of FBI background checks for student visas and green cards. The current manual process involves poring over files and soliciting dozens of records from an array of departments by mail and fax, keeping applications stuck for years. Increasingly, disgruntled graduates depart for more welcoming countries like Canada, leaving the U.S. to suffer brain drain. But if police records and other files are stored in databases, departments can more easily integrate with each other and exchange data in a streamlined manner. Similarly, when someone is in fact a danger to national security, important information is not inaccessibly compartmentalized—such as when the 9/11 hijackers were being followed by the FBI yet were issued green cards by the Immigration & Naturalization Service.

Building technology around standard protocols helps in integration not only between federal departments but also, eventually, between state and federal departments, which are more often than not completely out of sync.

Far from being limited to domestic affairs, the CTO could well be a commercial diplomat, working with the Commerce Secretary to expand the country's edge in high-tech exports. The Defense Dept.'s creation of the Web was seized on by Silicon Valley, launching the sustained economic boom of the 1990s, which saw American tech companies reach the commanding heights. Now with tech exports from Japan, India, and others nipping at America's heels, strategic partnerships between the government and tech companies could become a pillar of foreign policy. The CTO's office can spearhead international road shows for innovative U.S. firms ready to export user-friendly e-government platforms. The U.S. may lag behind Europe and the Far East in some areas, but much of the world has yet even to get off the ground, meaning the CTO can play a crucial role in introducing American tech firms to emerging markets. This effort can take inspiration from Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), which have multiplied their global customer base by adopting their products to foreign languages and cultures.

Beyond Obama's to-do list for the first American CTO, these guidelines will make the position more consistent with the modern-day definition of a CTO as the CEO's thought partner in mapping out a strategy for growth and operational efficiency. To start anywhere else would be to doom the CTO to an isolated, antiquated back-office IT role, dangerously incapable of enhancing American competitiveness in the 21st century.

Ayesha Khanna is a senior adviser at Fitzgerald Analytics, a strategic management consulting firm. She has worked for 10 years on Wall Street on technology governance and strategy initiatives, and is author of Straight Through Processing for Financial Services (Reed Elsevier, 2007). Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century (Random House, 2008).