Vivek Kundra, just named the first US chief information officer, is going to have his work cut out.

As profiled by The Washington Post, he sounds like a human whirlwind. At 34, and with less than two years as CTO of Washington DC, he’s clearly got ahead by shaking things up and asking the tough questions.

He also has a feeling for how to use new technologies to make government work better. That includes turning to YouTube to help explain how contractors can apply to handle DC services, and proposing Facebook as a way to collect parking fines (though that hasn’t happened yet).

But grappling with the monster of Federal technology would stretch the ingenuity of even the most energetic Young Turk.

As the rather static new Whiteshouse.gov website proves, it’s very hard to apply the social media technologies used so effectively during the election campaign to the operation of government.

Also, the big Federal agencies are circumscribed by all sorts of laws and regulations governing everything from how they maintain and protect their data to the very formalised processes they have to follow when hiring contractors.

Still, Kundra seems to have the instincts of an iconoclast. And in the Obama White House, he clearly has a strong backer. The main issue, as Andrea Di Maio at Gartner says, will be to make an early and careful calculation of which battles he has a chance of winning, and not to get consumed by fighting the many-headed Hydra.

Tags: Kundra

March 5, 2009 6:21pm in Mobile, Tech | Comment