What to Expect From Kundra

Technology contractors attending a breakfast on Thursday where Vivek Kundra, Obama's new federal chief information officer (aka, "administrator of the office of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget" back in the olden days) appeared, got a hint of where he may want to take agencies and information technology.

Kundra moderated a panel discussion sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. On the panel were Sonny Bhagowalia, CIO at the Interior Department, and Tom Pyke, the Energy Department's CIO. One of the questions Kundra asked the two CIOs was how are their agencies, using IT, helping the public make more informed decisions.

As part of his question, Kundra included a brief, but telling, reference to how grocery stores use data on product revenue and the placement of those products on shelves and in the store to drive sales. It can be as simple as knowing that when people come into the store to buy milk, they also buy bread, so the bread shelves are placed near the milk shelves. For the public sector, Kundra referred to this kind of process as a "context-driven government," where agencies move seamlessly from e-mail to Facebook to Twitter to PayPal.

This is pretty sophisticated and pushing-the-envelope stuff, so it wasn't a surprise that Bhagowalia and Pyke didn't offer detailed examples of how "context-driven government" might be playing out in their departments. Nevertheless, the comment cracks the door a bit into Kundra's thinking and how he might like agencies to use IT - to not only provide data to the public, but to mash that information up with other data that may be found in other agencies or available on the market that then can be used to drive better policy decisions, not only in agencies but in the public domain as well.

This reminded me of an article I wrote for CIO Magazine back in 2007 on how CIOs at mid-sized companies - those with sales between $100 million and $1 billion -- were beginning to make the argument to their bosses for investing in business intelligence applications. The article mostly presents how these mid-level CIOs formed an argument to invest in the technology, but it also offers examples of how they used BI, including some that are similar to Kundra's milk illustration. Although the examples all show how the businesses drove sales, the same theory can be applied to government to drive improved policies.