America's New CIO Loves Google

theodp writes "On Thursday, Barack Obama tapped Vivek Kundra for the post of Federal CIO, giving him responsibility for establishing and overseeing enterprise architecture across the federal government. So what might that look like? Well, little more than a month ago Kundra was slated to sing the praises of Google Apps to government officials in a webcast. A Kundra quote from the presentation slides: 'Why should I spend millions on enterprise apps when I can do it [with Google] at one-tenth cost and ten times the speed? It's a win-win for me.' You can follow Kundra's love affair with Google on YouTube, from his announcement of the Google-Washington DC partnership he brokered through a co-starring role with a Google attorney on a video pitching Google-enabled technology for the Obama Administration. Not surprisingly, some say Obama's choice of a Google-party-goer who worships Google could cause big headaches for Microsoft."

Re:google running our government IT?

[andy1307]

I doubt the IT heads of individual departments are just going to turn over their IT operations to him. In any case, a lot of government documents are hosted by large private sector contractors like Lockheed and EDS.

Re:google running our government IT?

[MistrBlank]

You do realize that Google also licenses out their applications for you to run internally right? Or how about the fact that even government applications experience outtages, it's not like the hardware they purchase is magically protected by a "never goes down" forcefield. Google as an entity isn't going anywhere and you can't call a business a single point of failure, trust me, their infrastructure is well built to sustain multiple failure. Better yet, I would prefer if our government leveraged Google's superior and private workforce and farm of server hardware that has proven itself than try to build the infrastructure from the ground up. Particularly if in 4 years or 8 years when the administration changes all of that work setting it up prefers to go with M$ exchange or Zimbra, or Netscape Mail, or Lotus, etc.

I work in government IT. Government doesn't have the buying power to hire the trained workstaff to set up an infrastructure like this reliably. I would prefer they "outsource" to Google.

In other words, shut the hell up because you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:Finally someone who gets it

[oodaloop]

Well, about 13 years ago, when I joined the community, we were way ahead. Our networks and applications were robust, and nothing on the internet could compare to what we had. All of our research was done on our classified networks; tryig to find something useful on the internet then was hopeless. But our slow acquisition and testing process held us back as the internet and commercial applications grew at a dizzying pace. Now with web 2.0 and the like, we're trying to play catch-up. We started Intellipedia (wikipedia for intel subjects) on our classified networks, but these days a lot of our basic research is done on the internet.

A lot of the complaints from other posters so far are about Google owning the govt's data, but that's not necessarily true. We can take their applications, like Google Earth as an example, and run it on our classified networks without Google seeing any of our data.

Re:Do you even have to ask?

[oodaloop]

We already use Google Earth on our classified networks, quite extensively actually. The kml is quickly becoming the file type of choice for geospatial information, replacing the shapefile (shp) used in ArcGIS.

What's to stop us from using some of their other applications as well?

Re:google running our government IT?

[Rary]

Reliability is not the problem. A private company handling documents is. ... If they decide to buy the apps from Google AND they are open source, great. But somehow I doubt that.

Read the presentation linked to in TFS. He specifically talks about using Google appliances for internal stuff — meaning it's nicely hidden away from the public and from Google — and using Google-hosted applications for documents that are supposed to be publicly accessible — meaning the public has greater access to information.

Re:google running our government IT?

[vux984]

Xbox

The important word was sells not software. He likes the fact that after a transaction with Microsoft, their employees have no ongoing access to what you bought.