Adviser Guides President Obama Into the Google Age

White House Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer and former Google executive, is working hard to bring her Silicon Valley sensibility to the Obama Administration. But four months into her job as President Barack Obama's top technology adviser, the woman whose division at Google dreamed up Google Glass and the driverless car is facing culture shock in a federal bureaucracy ruled by creaky technology and run in part on the floppy disk.

Smith advised the President on the technological issues before his decision late in 2014 to come out strongly in favor of a free and open Internet, including making sure that President Obama heard from Vinton Cerf, Google’s vice president and one of the chief architects of the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. She has also briefed the President on ways to recruit top technologists, particularly women, into the government to build state-of-the-art digital and mobile services.