September 1, 2009 By Steve Towns, Editor
No one can accuse Vivek Kundra of not hitting the ground running. In the six months since his appointment as federal CIO, Kundra is seemingly everywhere, making the case for radically changing how the federal government uses technology and launching initiatives aimed at nudging his vision closer to reality.
He's been the subject of high-profile coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post and InformationWeek. And Kundra's speaking schedule has been equally hectic, including recent appearances at Wired magazine's Disruptive by Design conference and the National Defense University's Cloud Computing Symposium.
Government Technology spoke with Kundra in mid-July, just days after he unveiled a new online IT dashboard that tracks the status of technology deployments in federal agencies. Kundra predicted the tool - part of a revamped USAspending.gov transparency Web site - would hold agencies more accountable for the performance of IT investments. Since then, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has temporarily halted 45 overbudget or behind-schedule IT projects that were identified by the dashboard.
Kundra also talked about how he intends to make it easier for federal agencies to adopt cloud-computing applications - and how the cloud-computing model could invite better collaboration among federal, state and local governments. Here's what he had to say:
What's your top priority at this moment?
From an IT perspective, one of the key areas we're focused on is leveraging the power of technology to fundamentally change the way agencies operate. Part of that involves making sure the $76 billion the U.S. government spends is managed properly and that we make the tough choices in terms of divesting from programs and projects that don't perform and investing in ones that perform and yield the dividends they promised in the very beginning.
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