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Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra was recognized this week by InformationWeek as the Chief of the Year. The magazine said it chose Kundra because he demonstrated “both a compelling IT strategy and an ability to deliver business benefits as a result of that strategy.”
Kundra, who was appointed Federal CIO by President Obama in March of this year, certainly deserves credit for taking on a herculean task. He was charged with implementing new technology to simplify access to government programs and services and to break down the barriers between various government departments and agencies.
But has he earned the honor of being recognized as CIO of the Year? Not yet. In time, he may very well earn that recognition, but for now Kundra and his initiatives are a work in progress. The situation is similar to the one President Obama found himself in when the he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Obama accepted the prize, but considered as more of a call to action. “I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said at the time.
Perhaps Kundra will view his recognition in the same way.
Kundra and his team to appear to be headed in the right direction. He took a bold step earlier this year when he launched the Data.gov site, a collection of cloud computing services aimed at lowering the cost of government and driving innovation. The Data.gov site has grown from 47 data sets when it was launched in May to some 118,000 data sets today.
Another initiative, the Federal IT Dashboard, was launched in June to provide a window into how the $75 billion Federal government IT budget is spent, along with a very simple visual method to see how each major department is doing on its IT projects. The dashboard, which uses a nice bright shade of red to show what percentage of IT projects are going awry at an agency or have “significant concerns” was bound to have shaken things up.
Kundra’s companion blog to the IT dashboard site, is a welcome window into the world of government IT, but there have only been five entries since July. More work needs to be done there.
Overall, Kundra deserves high marks for his performance on the job to date. But in my mind the jury is still out on whether he can turn the Titanic that is government IT around. Perhaps, in a couple of years from now, he’ll have a long list of accomplishments behind his record to truly deserve the title of CIO of the Year.
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