Updated 6.53 p.m. E.S.T.
“It’s not a coincidence that my first speech is being made in PARC,” Steven VanRoekel tells a roomful of curious people in Silicon Valley who have come to spend their Tuesday evening to find out what the nation’s federal chief information officer actually does.
“America’s future now depends on our capacity to innovate, and to harness technology,” VanRoekel says during his first public speech in his new role as America’s second chief information officer at PARC’s auditorium in Palo Alto. The event was organized by the Silicon Valley social and business groups The Churchill Club, TechNet and TechAmerica.
The legendary PARC has played a role in the development of many game-changing aspects of modern computing from the development of personal computers to key details such as the graphical user interface. The company, a subsidiary of Xerox, continues to work with both private companies and governments to come up with new ideas in computing and business processes.
President Obama appointed VanRoekel to the post early this August to succeed Vivek Kundra, who left earlier this year for a fellowship at Harvard.
On Tuesday, VanRoekel said that he wants to overhaul the federal bureaucracy to become more agile in an age of services delivered via mobile apps, and where information is atomized so that it can be mashed up by anyone to provide deeper insights. He also wants to break down massive multi-year information technology projects into smaller, more modular projects in the hopes of saving the government from getting mired in multi-million dollar failures.
“Too often, we have built closed, monolithic projects that are outdated or no longer needed by the time they launch,” he said.
As an example, he mentioned the Defense Department’s human resources management system. Dubbed the “Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System,” the project was meant to take seven years to develop. Instead, it took 10, cost $850 million and had to be scrapped after 10 years of development in 2010 because it ended up being useless.
“Going forward, we need to embrace modular development, build on open standards, and run our projects in lean startup mode,” he said.
To do that, VanRoekel launched an initiative Tuesday night he called “Future First,” which is an effort to establish new principles for the way the federal government develops technology projects.
He called on the technologists in the audience to submit their ideas on what those rules should be, and he intends to further crowd source the project for ideas at CIO.gov.
“I look forward to working with you in the months ahead as we shape “Future First” and reorient the government to take better advantage of the emerging and innovative technologies in constant pursuit of better, more effective government,” he said.
The whole idea is that government can use technology, web standards and open data to not only operate more efficiently, but to help to grease the wheels of commerce in the private sector.
Instead of having to go to an office to fill out piles of paper, or waiting for months in an inscrutable process for permits to build projects for example, VanRoekel wants to build mobile apps and web sites that let citizens and businesses interact with the government remotely and conveniently during the flow of their daily lives. The idea of putting the permitting process online, as an example, is to enable businesses to make government more accountable, and to give businesses more information about the status of their applications to enable better planning, VanRoekel said.
The crowd of technologists, business people, lawyers, school superintendents and other professionals at PARC on Tuesday night seemed appreciative of VanRoekel’s ideas.
After his speech, one of the audience members asked him what’s the most surprising aspect of his new job. VanRoekel said that it was managing the huge and sometimes unwieldy resources of his $80 billion budget.
VanRoekel certainly has a challenge before him. Even before he can modernize the federal government and the way it operates, he has to direct government agencies to cut waste.
One recent project, for example, was to consolidate the Department of Agriculture’s email system. Until recently, the department had 21 email systems, and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack couldn’t communicate with all USDA staff without help, VanRoekel said.
A USDA spokesman contacted TPM’s Idea Lab and clarified that the issue wasn’t limited to the secretary, but to all senior level staff. In an e-mail, he wrote that “senior leaders at
USDA couldn’t send an email to all staff without coordinating with individual agencies.”
Nevertheless, VanRoekel remained optimistic.
“We have a lot of new tools,” he said. “We have the opportunity to do more with less.”
Sarah Lai Stirland
Sarah Lai Stirland is a reporter for TPM's Idea Lab. She's reported and written on the process of innovation, technology and politics for the past 15 years at a variety of publications. They include Red Herring, National Journal's Technology Daily, the Village Voice, Wired.com, POLITICO and others. She can be reached at: sarah@talkingpointsmemo.com.