Obama’s CTO: Will It Be Worth the Hassle for the Candidates?

For the first time in the nation’s history, the US will have a CTO in Obama’s administration - a person in charge of the overall technological development of the government and making sure the latest technology standards are met. The idea of introducing this role is quite logical given the fact that Barack Obama expressed his concerns about the technological leadership of the country during the presidential race. Besides, a dedicated person is needed since Obama’s platform has a number of clear accents on high-tech fields and industries - which is obviously a plus for the overall technology sector, hopefully internet included.

The role for the CTO will include ensuring that all the governmental institutions and agencies have the infrastructure fitting the environment and requirements of the 21^st century. He will also need to work with each and every agency to ensure that they use the most advanced technologies and apply the best practices to their operations.

A difficult question here is if bureaucratic practices will allow this new CTO in the presidential administration do the job of ensuring progress and development or if he will end up fighting endless battles with CTOs and CIOs of agencies. Bloggers have already expressed their concerns over the future of the new CTO of the United States focusing on the issue of how difficult it will be for the person to achieve substantial results in transforming the way technology is applied to the governmental operations without destroying everything that now exists and starting anew.

There is no doubt that transforming the entire government into a responsive and advanced machine to operate according to the best practices of the 21^st century must be a task that is incredibly hard to accomplish. But the good part is that Obama must realize perfectly well the power of advanced technologies knowing how internet has helped him win the presidential race with the amazing results and will probably try to help the new CTO do the job efficiently.

Late last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt denied his intentions of serving as the chief technology officer for the country if invited. It is understandable that everyone is already speculating about the possible candidates for the role. Of course it sounds logical that someone from outside of the existing political circles is needed to cope with the major problems announced and accomplish the tasks stated by Barack Obama during the election campaign.

So this makes us think of heads of some technology companies to take the position in Obama’s administration - after all, Google is not the only technology-focused company in the US and there are alternatives so the final decision may be a total surprise to everyone. But my concerns are actually about how willing these people (who have already achieved significant success in the companies they work in and must be pretty satisfied with these results) will be about joining the government as CTO for the country and working on all the challenges involved in the role.

I suspect that there will be way too many challenges to address on this position that will be hard to outweigh the benefits of switching from a rewarding and safe position in some company to a dubious role of a person constantly engaging in battles with numerous CTOs and CIOs in various agencies. And unfortunately it is hard to tell how rewarding the position will be for the new CTO of the country given all the resistance he will inevitably have to face.