Moving Tech Front and Center

The federal information technology community must still be pinching themselves to make sure they are not dreaming. Almost every administration has relegated IT to the back administrative offices, thinking of the computer guys as propeller heads and chief information technology officers as someone who was there to fix the secretary's BlackBerry.

Now comes Barack Obama, who has mentioned technology and the Internet almost every week since he took office. The latest opportunity to see how much the administration is sold on tech came in the form of Obama's budget, released on Thursday. In the 140-page document, the word "technology" is mentioned 45 times, not counting when it appears as part of an agency name, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The word "cybersecurity" is mentioned seven times and the word "computer" appears four times.