Washington Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra is an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies. Much of the work he is doing for the district illustrates the direction many agencies are headed. Cost savings are a common thread through all of the initiatives, but capabilities that enable new ways to work and provide more useful information technology services are equally important.
Here are his top projects this year:
Project: Software as a service (or cloud computing)
Benefits: Increases employee
collaboration, reduces power
consumption.
Project: Server virtualization
Benefits: Allows server consolidation, increases server utilization rates dramatically.
Project: Voice over IP
Benefits: Enables new applications that mix voice, video and data; streamlines network management via a consolidated infrastructure.
— Doug Beizer
Among the videos of skateboard tricks and amateur singers on the popular Web site YouTube, viewers can also see coverage of Washington’s conferences for potential bidders on upcoming city procurements. That use of Web 2.0 technology is just one of many that government agencies will adopt during the next year and beyond, said Vivek Kundra, Washington’s chief technology officer.
Flat budgets, new security concerns and the need to attract fresh talent are leading to the adoption of new technologies and fresh looks at familiar tools such as open source and security.
For example, the old application service provider model has been reborn as cloud computing, though the underlying idea has not changed. Agencies buy applications on a subscription basis rather than paying for the infrastructure to support the software in-house.
The technology also helps government agencies with information sharing and collaboration.
Washington officials recently purchased 38,000 licenses to deliver Google Apps to all the city’s employees.
“With Google Apps, we can have employees working from home, employees sitting in traditional offices, and other employees on travel, all working on the same document, updating it in real time and collaborating,” Kundra said.
But allowing applications to be hosted outside the walls of an agency leads to new security concerns. Technologists from several companies agree that the face of federal IT is about to change significantly, creating new opportunities but also posing challenges. Here are five technologies or IT initiatives they see as front-burner projects this year.
1. Web 2.0 Government agencies are turning to small, portable software programs called widgets and Really Simple Syndication news aggregation to provide information to the public in a new way. The information can be aggregated and displayed on the government’s Web sites and packaged in portable widgets that users can take with them to their favorite Web locations, such as start pages and social-networking sites.
NewsGator, for example, will provide a news aggregation service for USA.gov within the next two months. “USA.gov is going to become an even more effective portal for the federal government, the go-to site for those who want to interact with different agencies of Uncle Sam,” said Jeff Nolan, vice president of NewsGator Consumer and Media Services. “They’ll be aggregating both government feeds and posts as well as certain relevant nongovernment, third-party content.”
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