The swooning began when President-elect Barack Obama unveiled his technology agenda at Google’s California headquarters a year ago this week. Techies, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and communications lawyers alike marveled at Obama’s promise to hire the nation’s first chief technology officer, thrilled at the thought of having one of their kind heading up tech policy at one of the highest echelons of government: the White House cabinet.
But in all that excitement, did the tech sector and the press make a faulty assumption regarding the importance of this future “Technology Officer in Chief”? Will Obama’s tech czar actually be a member of his cabinet? Or do we all have our wires crossed?
Weeks ago, a then-campaign spokesman pointed me toward Obama’s technology agenda and noted that the it didn’t say anything about Obama’s future CTO being a cabinet member.
Indeed, the now one-year-old proposal says only that the new president would “appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer” to ensure that the government has infrastructure, policies and services commensurate for the 21st Century, among other things.
Obama’s transition team has been mum on the CTO’s future pay grade and hasn’t responded to queries. That comes as no surprise; they’re probably fielding a lot of questions about the unprecedented position, seeing as nobody knows what it will encompass.
“It’s uncertain at this point what the job will entail, but it’s a good bet that the Internet [and technology] sector will have some say in how it’s shaped,” said Art Brodsky, Public Knowledge communications director, on a recent policy blog post. The job could be one of the toughest in the Obama Administration, he added, “herding all the federal agency ‘cats’ in the same direction to make their technology more uniform.”
The tech czar may also be called upon to link technology with Obama’s broader policy goals in health care, energy, climate change and job creation, said Rebecca Arbogast, a telecommunications analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. The Obama team has a “real faith in the power of technology,” she said. “This isn’t just technology just for its own sake; it’s figuring out how to deploy technology to solve real problems.”
With so many unknowns, the future CTO may personally have a big impact on how the job takes shape, which begs another question: what type of candidate is Obama looking for?
The president’s science advisor — which is not a cabinet post — has historically been an academic from the sciences, for example. In hiring a technology brain, Obama could similarly tap an academic, such as Stanford Law School’s Lawrence Lessig (who has, for the record, said he’s not interested). But with the management prowess and political smarts likely to be required for the job, onlookers expect that Obama will look to the private sector or the government before the classroom.
Obama could pull an executive out of a major technology company — though it likely wouldn’t be Google, since CEO Eric Schmidt has said he would decline an offer. Obama could tap a whiz from his tech savvy campaign team, such as the oft-floated Julius Genachowski, Internet entrepreneur, author of Obama’s technology agenda and member of the transition team. Obama could also look for a star Chief Information Officer from one of the 50 states, a powerful communications lawyer from Washington, or a leader from the Federal Communications Commission or the Commerce Department’s technology branch.
“Really, nobody knows what Obama is looking for,” said Arbogast. “We don’t know whether they’re looking for someone with a hard core scientific background, or a business background, or somebody who is more visionary or theoretical. Ideally, you would want all three.”
— Adrianne Kroepsch
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