Vivek Kundra seeks to streamline fed computing

The Obama administration's top computer systems chief started a West Coast tour of tech giants such as Apple and Google on Wednesday to pick up Silicon Valley ideas that can help streamline a complex federal information technology bureaucracy.

Vivek Kundra, the first federal chief information officer, is charged with overhauling a technology network that has, over time, grown to 24,000 Web sites and 1,100 data centers. In a meeting with Chronicle reporters and editors, Kundra also outlined his broader vision of how an overhaul using wiser choices of technology, such as cloud computing, mobile applications and social networking, could change the way government operates.