There’s a new Federal CTO in town and early looks at his agenda are filled with words like innovation and transformation.  Aneesh Chopra was previously the Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia and will now be working alongside the new federal CIO Vivek Kundra.  According to a recent article in Federal Computer Week, Mr. Chopra outlined four themes that will guide his work in this newly created role:

1. Bring as much policy rigor as possible to transforming the country’s economy through technology-based innovation. “It will be important to think about how we introduce policy to foster innovation” nationally, as well as across state and jurisdictional boundaries.

2. Look for game-changing ways to address the president’s priorities through so-called innovation platforms, or new approaches using technology.  Three areas of focus will be:

• Open standards. “We need the private sector to lead, but we need a culture of open standards,” he said. That doesn’t preclude proprietary standards, he added. But open standards and applications that could be shared and replicated easily would remain at the center of efforts to drive innovation.
• Government research and development. Chopra also envisioned redirecting where the government might focus its research and development commitment. “There’s an emerging debate of how far up the [R&D] food chain we should go” and whether the government should target resources closer to the application stage, he said, adding that he would examine opportunities “in the middle ground, south of procurement and north of R&D.”
• Crowd sourcing. Chopra said the government would continue to tap the potential of crowd sourcing, or the use of networks of contributors, to gather new ideas and fuel public-sector innovation.

3. Deliver on the president’s commitment to ensure that the country has a reliable and trustworthy digital infrastructure.

4. Commitment to greater transparency, citizen participation and collaboration.

An interesting quote from the article was directed at software developers: “We’re going to have start a dialogue to develop bug-free software or bug-free software development.”

 In addition to focusing on policy recommendations and technology innovations that support the president’s priorities for the economy, health care costs and education, Chopra said he would also look for tools that could help spur innovation. One possibility is working with the General Services Administration to develop an “innovation sandbox” where project ideas could be tested and shared across the government.  He also said the government would use new interactive technologies to seek broad public input and then begin to craft policy recommendations.

Sounds like visualization might be a good vehicle for this kind of collaborative input?

At iRise we applaud the focus on improving federal IT and applying best practices learned from the commercial world to the public sector.  As taxpayers we should all be concerned about cutting wasteful government spending; failure is simply no longer an option.   There is a huge opportunity to modernize and innovate along the themes outlined by Mr. Chopra and we support the effort.