An Agenda for Obama's CTO

[Commentary] The US may be the first country to have a Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Goals for the CTO include broadband expansion, boosting science/tech education, health-care computerization, patent reform, and e-government. What is missing is an effective and efficient strategy. The Obama team needs to be careful not to reinvent the wheel, focusing instead on technology lessons from the countries that have overtaken the U.S. already, the practices of companies that have top CTOs, and a flexible strategy for implementing policy across the sprawling federal government. What's needed is continuous public-private collaboration to ensure that innovations are adapted to the government setting. Areas where discussions would be especially useful range from building energy-efficient infrastructures such as green data centers and cloud computing to providing citizens online government services using Web 2.0 technologies.

[Ayesha Khanna is a senior adviser at Fitzgerald Analytics, a strategic management consulting firm. She has worked for 10 years on Wall Street on technology governance and strategy initiatives, and is author of Straight Through Processing for Financial Services (Reed Elsevier, 2007). Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century (Random House, 2008)]