U.S. CTO outlines nation's IT strategy

>> What is it that the Chief Technology's officer is focused on so that you get a sense for where my priorities are in serving our President? They are applying those principals across three dimensions. First, and most obvious to this community, how can we invest in the building blocks of innovation. Government is best when it sets the rules and assures that there's a fair level playing field and allows the marketplace to deliver the results we expect of it. So what are those building blocks of innovation? We see them in three ways. Insuring we have smart secure infrastructure; focusing on ways in which we can harness our 150 billion dollar research and development budget to bring innovation through the research and development apparatus; and third making sure that we have a 21st Century workforce; the people infrastructure that I just referenced. In this case, focusing on science technology, engineering and math as key foundation areas for the next generation workforce. Second, we are focusing on promoting innovation against the President's national priorities; and if you look at the priorities of this administration they are obvious. The President's been very clear that our top priority is to fix our health care system and we have an active and vigorous debate in Washington right now on how we can go about delivering the promise of health reform. We are also focused on energy independence and in the technology context that is the deployment of a smart grid all across the country. And then last but not least, the President has talked about modernizing our educational system and our priority here is to make sure that we are leveraging technology to advance the education agenda. Last but not least, we must make sure that in public policy we eat our own proverbial dog food. That if we think it's important to spur innovation, re-large assumed spelling across the country, then we must embrace the principal's innovation in our own operations. This is the President's open government initiative and it is my responsibility to ensure that we are championing the principals of transparency, participatory democracy and collaboration into the DNA of government operations. And to help support that we are provisioning a set of platforms that I'll be talking about momentarily. This is a fairly robust agenda and the levers we deploy against this agenda are as follows: While there's a lot of work to be done, our most appropriate level of influence is on the following manner: One, how can we support a collaborative approach to standards that will ensure that we have the kind of level playing field to deliver that kind of game-changing innovation; there's an active work taking place right now to develop standards in health care on the energy sector, but we see this as an opportunity in a number of dimensions. The second, as I referenced earlier, the research and development area, how do we leverage the research and development investments to bring a higher focus on commercialization and the ability to bring value in areas that are critical to this country? And then last but not least, we as a nation spend nearly 75 billion dollars on Information Technology just within the federal government itself. How do we insure that our procurement or acquisition strategies help to further the cause as opposed to hinder the cause. That is, how do we leverage our buying power to promote game-changing innovation as opposed to stifling it with the challenges we have all come to know and how we do what we do.

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