The CIO And The Consumer Effect

The chief technology officer of Washington, D.C., just got back from the Consumer Electronics Show and he's fired up. "Why is it that consumers have better technology in their hands than the enterprise space?" he asks.Vivek Kundra is on a mission to improve local government services through technology. Since being appointed last summer as the CTO of the District of Columbia, Kundra has implemented several cutting-edge (i.e. Web 2.0) technology projects, like the wiki he created to help the police department develop a new evidence warehouse. (The wiki can be found here -- scroll down and look for the YouTube videos about the Evidence Warehouse project.)

"Why are we conducting procurement the same way we did 20 years ago?" Kundra says. The wiki will allow the city of Washington to interact quickly and efficiently with multiple vendors and the specifics of their proposals, that is, "leverage some of the advantages they have in the commercial world," he says, which will "lower the cost yet drive up the value on the value chain." Now Kundra's looking at the feasibility of using GIS technology in the city's snowplows and police cruisers.

Since the mayor's office took control of the city's public schools last year, Kundra is intimately involved in trying to improve the educational system. He's put 6,000 PCs into the public schools, he says, one in every classroom along with labs with multiple PCs in every school. Next up: smartboards in the classrooms, which he says is about a year away.

Kundra has selected four schools -- one elementary school, one junior high school, and two high schools -- to help test his ideas on upgrading education through technology. He's running high-speed networks directly into those schools, for example, lighting up dark fiber the city had lying dormant.

And he's working closely with a few select vendors: Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. He's looking at the work Microsoft has done in the Philadelphia school system, in particular the use of smart cards to "track attendance and grades." He's working with Cisco to help wring the most out of network capacity, which is important, Kundra says, if the schools are to leverage the wireless networks and the high-capacity applications like videoconferencing and collaboration that he's planning.

That's where Google comes in. Kundra has started a project to test the use of Google Apps "to provide more of a collaborative environment for schoolwork and homework." He's doing it through focus groups, he says, soliciting people from the administration side, a few technology people, and students from McKinley Technology High School, a technology-oriented public school in Washington, to help develop applications using the Google productivity and collaboration apps. He expects to have something "in the next 60 days" for each of the four designated schools to start testing.

Kundra describes software as a service as a "megatrend in the industry," and he plans to focus his e-government initiatives around it. SaaS "will allow us to quickly deploy applications throughout the network," he says.

That's this particular CIO's version of the so-called "Consumer Effect." How has the Consumer Effect affected you?