Vivek Kundra
First CIO of the United States of America
Vivek Kundra is the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, and was appointed to the position by President Obama in February 2009. The Federal CIO is responsible for directing the policy and strategic planning of federal information technology investments, as well as oversight of federal spending on information technology. Three months after his appointment, Mr. Kundra unveiled an IT Dashboard that tracks over $80 billion in federal IT spending, and which is designed to provide CIOs of individual government agencies, the public, and agency leaders unprecedented visibility into the operations and performance of Federal IT investments.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Kundra was Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, after serving as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the state of Virginia.
Mr. Kundra was born in New Delhi, India and moved to Tanzania with his family at the age of one, before moving to Washington, DC at the age of eleven.
Ed Yourdon: Given that we do have such a short time, I thought I would focus on just three things. First, what exciting things do you see coming along, somewhat like the cloud that I see you’ve really latched onto?
And then the dark side of the force, you know, what are the things that keep you awake at night? And the one thing I’m very curious about is your opinion of the impact of the next generation, the kids coming out of school right now and their assumptions and attitudes about social media and technology and the whole works. Do you see that as a significant thing? So in terms of futures, the cloud is a good example of something that’s already here but do you see other things coming down the pipeline in the next couple of years that could dramatically change?
Kundra: There are three megatrends that are going to disrupt our current technology landscape. So, if you look at how we deploy technology, the word that I’ve coined is “digital oil.”
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Kundra: And the reason I think that technology is like digital oil today is because if you look at just the federal government, we went from 432 data centers to more than 2,000 in about a decade.
Yourdon: I saw those figures.
Kundra: Average utilization of servers in these datacenters is under 26 percent. So you could just imagine the compute power we’re throwing out that’s not really being utilized. And storage utilization is under 40 percent. Yet, when you look at manufacturing, asset utilization in most industrialized countries, whether it’s the United States or Canada, Brazil, the entire European Union, it’s about 79 percent.
Yourdon: Wow.
Kundra: So the question before us is why do we accept a 50 percentile differential between how we deploy IT versus our manufacturing base? And the reason I’m calling it “digital oil” is because it is so vital to the prosperity of the country and the prosperity of our economy.
Yourdon: Okay.
Kundra: We are as dependent on IT as we are oil to drive the economy. And what we need to start doing is figuring out what is the equivalent of alternative fuels for technology—and that’s why I’ve been very passionate about the move to the cloud.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Kundra: The ability to massively scale and provide resources on demand and a consumption-based model, rather than just overbuilding, underutilizing, harmful for the environment assets is extremely inefficient and unsustainable.
Yourdon: Okay.
Kundra: There is a tectonic shift in technology driven by three megatrends: one is mobile, two is social, three is cloud.
Yourdon: Okay.
Kundra: All driven by consumerization of IT and the fact that every person, every endpoint is becoming a sensor that’s not only consuming information, but it’s also generating digital-borne content.
In the public sector scenario, consider this: The National Archives archives one billion pieces of paper a year, and that’s all historical content. Think about all the new content this is being generated: blogs, videos, information from sensors across the board—the demand for computing and for storage is beyond anyone’s comprehension today.
Yourdon: Okay.
Kundra: Sensors are generating data from intelligent transportation systems to the electrical grid, which requires us to fundamentally rethink our computing models as a result of these megatrends. And underlying all of that is obviously going to be issues around security and privacy.
Yourdon: Right, which is probably the first thing on your list on the dark side of the force. Security and privacy.
Kundra: On some of the issues there, it’s not just that it’s simply looked at as security and privacy, but it’s also when you start making available geospatial data, when social becomes an integral part of human behavior, when it comes to leveraging a lot of the mobile devices, the privacy issues are very serious and they’re very real. And from a security perspective, when you look at nation-states building massive capabilities, and in the context of cyber-warfare, when you look at organized crime and you look at the number of phishing attacks and how they’re exponentially increasing, we put in charge a four-star general to build that cyber-command because we realize that this new landscape, when you look at it from a military perspective, our command and control systems, and we’ve gone through many revolutions since the days of the Pony Express.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: Our adversaries were constantly trying to disrupt the military command and control systems; the same was true during the telegraph era, and today it’s cyber. The other part is to think about how larger parts of our economy are moving to the digital world. Wireless transportation, banking, health care, and energy require that we hardwire security up front. And we must make sure that we are not focused on the silly notion of “perimeter security,” because that’s dead.
Yourdon: When you had mentioned the whole consumerization thing, one of the interesting things that I wasn’t anticipating—which I’ve heard from several people in my interviews—is a shift that has taken place from when I got into the field, where everything was top-down. If you go back 50 years, it was the government that first bought computers, to build bombs and things like that, ’cause they were expensive, and now, probably typified most by Google, but really, across the board, it’s bottom-up.
Kundra: Mm-hmm.
Yourdon: A lot of the vendors are building products for the consumer marketplace first, ’cause there are lots more of them, and everybody brings their gadget into the office, and then eventually everybody says, “I want an iPad,” and so now it’s going bottom-up, which is a pretty significant change, I think.
Kundra: I actually think that’s a great change. That’s how it should have been.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Kundra: One of the first things I did when I came into office was to launch the IT dashboard. To drive transparency on how all of our IT assets were performing across the board. And what you realize very quickly is there’s a huge gap between the public and private sector when it comes to information technology. And a big part of that gap is because the villain is mostly the CIOs. They act like villains, they are still tied to the old IT model of command and control while all their customers hate the enterprise IT solutions they are forced to use.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: And they pretend, under the guise of security, that they are more secure. To give you a data point, I went up to the Silicon Valley and I spent a lot of time in the Bay Area.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Kundra: And I was talking to all these startups, and I was telling them, “Well, why don’t you compete for government business?” because part of what I’m trying to introduce is Darwinian pressure in the public sector because we spend $80 billion a year on IT.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Kundra: How great would it be if we could get some of the most innovative companies in this country to compete for some of these really large contracts? And a lot of the startups told me, “Well, some federal government employees are already using our solution.”
Yourdon: [laughter]
Kundra: It’s a new world order, and I ask the CIOs a very simple question, which is, “Why is it that everybody hates enterprise software? Nobody’s ever said ‘I love my user experience.’” And people love some of these consumer solutions.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: And part of the reason is also because these guys have monopolies; it’s like an IT cartel. Once you win the contract, there aren’t really incentives to innovate. So if you have a five-year contract, your incentive is to increase margins. Compare that with the consumer space where every day you’re one click away from extinction.
Yourdon: That’s right.
Kundra: You’re constantly innovating and that isn’t happening in the enterprise space. And those companies are actually obsessed with the customer experience, and that’s part of what we’ve done in the federal government. That is why we have focused on going after some of these wasteful projects by killing them or turning them around. We’ve been able to save $3 billion. These are huge changes in federal IT.
Yourdon: Another thing that I heard which I know you’ve been involved with for quite some time—I think the best phrase is from a futurist named Clay Shirky with his term the “cognitive surplus”—this idea that probably for the first time in history, society has an excess of brainpower that can be contributed using computers for the greater good, the classic example of which is, of course, Wikipedia.
Kundra: Mm-hmm.
Yourdon: But your Apps for Democracy1 I think is a wonderful example. Now you did that for the city of Washington, didn’t you?
Kundra: When I was the chief technology officer in the District of Columbia, one of the problems I was trying to solve was in introducing disruption in government IT, and I realized the only way I could do it was to change the paradigm, because the way the government buys IT, it’s usually through these contracts or grants. And the model was broken, and I realized, “Well, wait a second. What if I put up a challenge and tapped into the ingenuity of our citizens?”
__________
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: And if by democratizing data and challenging developers to build useful applications? What was amazing about this initiative is we only spent $50,000.
Yourdon: And $3.2 million in savings?
Kundra: Right. I gave people 30 days, and I got 47 applications, which ended up saving about $3.2 million. What would normally have cost millions, I got for 50 grand. And that is why when I came into the Administration, one of the first things I did is launch data.gov.
Yourdon: Okay.
Kundra: We started with 47 data sets, and now we’ve got over 400,000 data sets. And we also worked with Congress on the America COMPETES Act that now gives every agency the same authorities that DARPA and NASA have to launch challenges and prizes up to $50 million.
Yourdon: Really?
Kundra: Agencies can say, “Here’s our problem. We want it solved and are willing to pay $50 million.” And crowd-source solutions.
Yourdon: You know, it’s fascinating because I present seminars in Rome on Enterprise 2.0, and up until now, the pharmaceutical industry has been one of the best examples of, of this concept.
Kundra: Eli Lilly?
Yourdon: And Pfizer. There’s one other one. And the people that I meet in Rome are just astounded and can’t believe that anybody would be doing this.
Kundra: Well, have you heard my other example that I use about Rome and the Agora? In the Agora people would convene in a public square to petition their government, to conduct commerce, to socialize.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: Now through technology, what you have is a digital public square that’s global. So the ability to convene and to harness, especially for this president, who really cares about tapping into the ingenuity of the American people, the power of technology can be used actually to tap into millions of people across the country to solve some of the toughest problems this country faces, rather than a few people behind closed doors, which has been the old, traditional model.
Yourdon: Well, I’m delighted to hear it—it’s got this kind of central thrust behind it because the examples I’ve seen so far have been very few and far between. There’s one in New York called Clever Commute2. But, again, those have been isolated examples. I’ve had trouble tracking down some. I’d mentioned there was a third area I wanted to chat with you about since I’m watching the clock: your thoughts about the impact that the next generation, the digital natives, or whatever you want to call them, and their impact on how they’re going to use technology to impact government or society. Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Kundra: Well, I’m actually very, very optimistic. And I’ll tell you what one of the things that the President did when he came into office. He said he wanted to make sure that government service was cool.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Kundra: We’ve looked at what the next-generation workforce will look like. Not a year or 2 from now, 10, 15, 20 years from now.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Kundra: The leading trends, whether you’re in the Bay Area, you’re in Austin, Boston, New York, Silicon Valley. It’s nothing like a government office today.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: But there are two shining examples. The Patent and Trademark Office is one of the leaders in teleworking, and what they’ve done is rejected the old model of managing through sight. “If I can see you, I know you’re working. But if I don’t see you, you’re not working.”
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: They’ve got 50 percent of their workforce teleworking, all over the country. And they’re able to attract some of the smartest people across the country, and they’ve been able to quantify work. It’s been an amazing success. The other one is the Government Accountability Office [(GAO)].
Yourdon: Hmm.
__________
Kundra: Now that happened because after the anthrax attack the Senate had to evacuate. They took over the GAO building. And GAO employees had to look at innovative technologies to continue their work. But beyond that, I think, for us to be able to attract the best people in the country, we’ve got to be able to fundamentally rethink the nature of work and this notion that people are only productive 9-to-5 in a single location.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Kundra: But the most important thing for us is to make sure that what we’re doing is that we’re recognizing this trend of the rise of employee-owned.
Yourdon: I see. Aha, okay. Do you see any impact coming from the next generation outside of the so-called First World countries? You know, when you get devices that are cheap enough that anyone in the world can afford them, I think that also changes the balance of power in a lot of ways, pretty much illustrated by what’s going on in the Middle East right now.
Kundra: Well, absolutely. For example, with what’s going on in Egypt and the use of social media, or frugal engineering in India, which is an area that we pay a lot of attention to. When you think of the scale of a country like India and the problems it has to solve with 1.1 billion people, or China, with 1.3 billion people, the approach and the underlying technical architecture is fundamentally different than when you’re designing solutions for 310 million people.
Yourdon: Right.
Kundra: We’re very interested in looking at some other leapfrog technologies, whether it’s in South Africa or in India or in China, in terms of how are they are leapfrogging; what does mobile commerce look like; and as I mentioned, the three megatrends in social, mobile, and cloud, and how they will fundamentally alter development and commerce.
Yourdon: Some guy just found one of his spare PCs in the garage and used that and $500 from his credit card to get it started. And if you extend that, then I assume that the next obvious step is that entrepreneurial startup model is going to operate in China and India and Africa and all over the world. Umm, fascinating.
Kundra: It’s exciting.
Yourdon: Yeah, it is exciting. And I’m delighted to hear that there are initiatives underway that, you know, I was unaware of.
Kundra: President Obama has said that we’re going to win the future by out-innovating, outcompeting on a global scale. And we’re in a very good position because the U.S. economy, and the innovation that’s happening, especially in all of these three megatrends is actually leading-edge, whether you look at cloud, you look at what we’re doing in the context of digital oil.
Yourdon: Yeah.
Kundra: How do we disrupt that? The key is going to be to make sure that as Clay Christensen says, that the “innovator’s dilemma” doesn’t kick in.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Kundra: Unfortunately, I’ve got to run.
Yourdon: I very much appreciate your time.