Live On Video: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra In His Own WordsLive On Video: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra In His Own Words

I've been hunting around to see if we can flesh out the picture of our new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra. On Thursday, our own K.C. Jones wrote about his priorities, and Rob Preston and Bob Evans have blogged about what he needs to do and the top 10 questions he should answer. So now let's hear from Kundra in his own words, in three YouTube videos. The most interesting is where Kundra talks about championing Google Apps in his previous position as CIO of the District of Columbia.Here's the Google Apps video, by way of Google's own Apps channel on YouTube. It's really interesting to see how he got Google Apps deployed to the fire department and other agencies. It's an indication that Kundra is a guy who operates in the realm of the doable, and he seems pretty dynamic and enthusiastic besides.

Here's a second video, courtesy of the Washington, D.C.-based Wireless Communications Association. Kundra spoke on April 28, 2008, at the WCA 2008 conference. The video is of fairly poor quality (the audio is really bad). He's talking about the importance of interoperability, and how that was hammered home to him on 9/11, when he was interviewing for a job as director of infrastructure technology when the U.S. was attacked:

The third vid is a very dry episode filed at a pre-bid solicitation conference for the evidence control and storage facility for the Washington, D.C., police. Kundra appears in the video at the 4:16 mark. What one gets from this video, again, is his persona as a calm but effective -- and I would say, charismatic -- IT leader.

I particularly like how he's able to effectively evangelize and advocate for technology deployment, like when he tells the crowd: "Why is it that you can be at home today and have more computing power at your fingertips than the average police officer who comes in to work?"

Plus, he likes to use Wikis!

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of information.com.