Needed: Presidential IT IQ

For years, information technology has been trying to break into the corporate board room or the high-level government management meetings where it can help inform strategies to accomplish an organization’s goals, be it making more profit or serving the public interest. Despite assertions that state otherwise, IT still, by a long shot, has yet to really become a driver in helping government deliver public services and fundamentally transform how agencies do business. IT has tinkered at the edges.

The reason may be that most of our political leaders are so disinterested in IT. We were reminded of that last week during the Republican presidential debates. As Garrett Graff, an editor at large at Washingtonian magazine, reminded us in the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section, presidential hopeful “Sen. John McCain let slip a fairly stunning admission,” when he said he “might ‘rely on a vice president’ for help on less important issues such as ‘information technology, which is the future of this nation's economy.’”

The problem, as Graff points out, is the odd allowance we as a nation give presidential candidates to admit that they know so little about an industry that is vitally important to the national economy â€" and for that matter, to national security. Such admissions happen with surprising regularly. We’ve written about Defense Secretary Robert Gates â€" who oversees the world’s largest military complex, which has pursued network-centric warfare as its primary strategic objective â€" that he is “a very low-tech person.” President Bush also has made statements about his ignorance of IT, as my colleague Tom Shoop pointed out in his FedBlog this past summer.

Graff does tip his hat to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for issuing last month an “innovation agenda,” which lays out an IT agenda for government. Yes, the agenda represents “an exception to the rule” in the presidential race, as Graff says, but almost all Obama’s ideas are vague and warmed, and only advance the introductory Bush IT agenda, which accomplished little of what it set out to do, in just small ways.

The nation and government need something more. Something bolder that shows an understanding of how important IT is to the U.S. economy, how it can transform government and truly improve public services.