Federal IT Dream Team Faces Hard RealitiesFederal IT Dream Team Faces Hard Realities

With President Obama's appointments of Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO and Jeffrey Zients as chief performance officer, and with Vivek Kundra in office as federal CIO, the pieces are in place for the United States to raise the bar on IT strategy and implementation in government. The trio represent a dream team of IT innovators, but it's solving the tough challenges of the here and now by which they must also be judged.As Virginia's secretary of technology, Chopra's job has involved promoting the state's "innovation agenda" and technology-related economic development. His resume at a glance: a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, a masters in public policy from Harvard, and work experience as managing director of health care think tank the Advisory Board Co. In Virginia, he chairs the Solutions Committee of the IT Investment Board, the Effectiveness and Efficiency Committee of the Council on Virginia's Future, and co-chairs the Healthcare IT Council.

It's an impressive background, to be sure. In a blog post on the appointment, O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly calls Chopra a "rock star" and "change maker." As federal CTO, Chopra will be tasked with promoting technological innovation to help create jobs, reduce health care costs, and protect the country. Working with CIO Kundra, Chopra and chief performance officer Zients (more on him in a bit) will help make government more "effective, efficient, and transparent," according to the White House.

"The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we're spending their money, and can hold us accountable for the results," President Barack Obama said in his weekly address.

Zients is a businessman, management consultant, and, most recently, founder and managing partner of Portfolio Logic, an investment firm focused on business and healthcare service companies. As chief performance officer, Zients will work to "streamline processes, cut costs, and find best practices" throughout government, President Obama said.

It's great that the CIO, CTO, and CPO will be working together on common IT goals and initiatives with an eye on efficiency and an expectation that metrics will be applied in gauging their progress. The U.S. government's new IT leaders have an affinity for cloud computing, Web 2.0, and other new tools of the trade, and there's every reason to think that they will look to apply them to the task ahead.

But that's really only half the job--the "what's next" part of it. The here and now is an existing IT infrastructure and processes with inefficiencies, gaps, and shortcomings that are well documented. Overcoming the challenges of cybersecurity, interoperability, and government IT silos are every bit as important to IT excellence in government, and, so far, we don't know how they will go about addressing and improving government agency performance in those areas.

information highlighted the dual nature of the challenges ahead in our cover story on the federal CTO position in February. "Two enormous tasks will lay in front of that person," editor Chris Murphy wrote. "One is to drive the government to use IT more effectively and efficiently. The second, even broader job is to influence how IT is leveraged for economic growth and national competitiveness everything from financing tech R&D to building out a national broadband infrastructure to helping tech employers develop and get access to the most talented people." (See "Federal CTO Agenda: The Industry's Advice To Obama.")

At the time, information editor in chief Rob Preston wrote that the federal CTO "needs to think big-but not so big that it becomes impossible to get things done. That means focusing on the government's technology and data architectures (cloud computing, data center consolidation, Web applications, data warehousing, etc.) and setting procurement and other standards across agencies."

The Obama administration is right to emphasize the importance of IT vision and innovation as part of its broader agenda. But as every CIO in business will tell you, the less glamorous part of the job--software quality, process improvement, data protection and governance, interoperability, and cost cutting--is every bit as difficult and no less important.