Kundra agrees with his boss, saying Obama 'pointed out how tough the problem really is.' Kundra: Fed IT is 'horrible'

President Barack Obama echoed office workers everywhere last week when he was caught on microphone complaining about the IT services at work.

"We can't get our phones to work,” he said.


The White House is “like 30 years” behind the times when it comes to technology, he said.

“IT purchasing” throughout the government is “horrible,” he said.

Sound familiar?

This part won’t: The man in charge of government IT actually agrees.

“Federal IT is horrible — that’s why we’ve made it a priority to aggressively crack down on wasteful IT spending and turn around poorly performing projects,” says Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer.

In an interview with POLITICO, Kundra didn’t bristle at the boss’s frustration. Instead, he said that Obama had “pointed out how tough the problem really is.”

The government now spends about $80 billion a year on technology systems — up from $46 billion in 2001. For that amount of money, federal employees might expect state-of-the-art equipment.

Obama apparently did; unaware that a mic was pumping his words into a press room in Chicago last week, the president said he expected to find “real cool phones and stuff” when he got to the Oval Office. No such luck.

“I’m like, ‘Come on guys, I’m the president of the United States,’” Obama said. “Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff, and the big screen comes up? It doesn’t happen.”

Kundra said the government wastes billions of dollars on ineffective technology systems. He said he found $3 billion in savings by using the IT Dashboard, a tool he introduced in 2009 that tracks how much the government spends on information technology investments.

Other progress has been made, he said. When the Obama administration came into office, “We had giant boxes on our desks instead of the laptops and docking stations we have now.”

But even Kundra still can’t use his favorite devices and applications in his office.

“Why do I still have two cellphones?” he said, referring to his personal iPhone and his work-issued BlackBerry. “We need to bring consumer devices to the federal government. … This is something that’s going to take years. We’re not going to move the federal government overnight.”

Kundra has pushed consumer-focused companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon to get into the government game. They are now selling “cloud computing” services, which store information for multiple agencies on large corporate-run servers, instead of each federal agency having to run its own equipment. Consolidating such data centers will save money and help the government run more efficiently, Kundra said.

The government already uses some cloud computing services. For example, the General Services Administration uses Google Apps to power its email and other software tools, and the Department of Agriculture uses Microsoft’s products.

The administration will soon issue a $2.5 billion cloud-computing procurement for federal and state agencies. One of Kundra’s first priorities is revamping the government’s email system.

Instead of each agency having its own email scheme, Kundra has been working on creating a governmentwide, cloud-based email network. The administration expects to save $42 million from moving two agencies’ email systems to the cloud, and the move will eliminate 800 data centers over the next five years.

“These are little green shoots throughout the government,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media who has advised some government agencies on technology projects. “Overall, I feel optimistic that things are moving in the right direction.”

But these products bring up security concerns — and that’s what’s largely kept the government “substantially behind” the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies, said Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president of FedSources, a government contract consulting firm.

“It’s great to have whiz-bang, gee-whiz technologies — everyone wants the new toys — but it’s not necessarily something the government can embrace right off the bat,” Bjorklund said.

Revamping the technology systems is also an expensive undertaking — an expense the cash-strapped government isn’t necessarily able to make. Kundra has focused his attention on identifying wasteful spending, but the old-fashioned systems — many of which are used by hundreds of thousands of workers — need to be replaced.

And government IT projects have a reputation for being behind schedule and over budget — sometimes by hundreds of millions of dollars.

For example, the Government Accountability Office found that the National Archives’ electronic records project had not addressed cost overruns, ending up costing taxpayers between $250 million and $405 million. Last year, a Department of Defense Human Resources system was canceled after 10 years of development and about $850 million — about twice the intended investment.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, said reform is needed for the government to adopt “cheaper, better and faster technologies.”

“The failures of information technology management in the federal government have, in some cases, been spectacular,” Carper said at a hearing earlier this month.

Six months ago, Kundra unveiled a 25-point plan to help rein in out-of-control IT costs. For instance, the administration put in place specific criteria that projects have to meet in order to get funded. Kundra will give an update on the plan’s progress next week.

Kundra has also pushed the government to publish thousands of data sets on Data.gov, so that citizens can use information about hospital patient reviews, for example, or product recalls.

But budget cuts could endanger e-government projects such as Data.gov. The federal budget passed last week would slash e-government funds from a proposed $35 million to $8 million — and that could also threaten the IT Dashboard.

When asked about the cuts, Kundra said he was still evaluating the impact but added “we’re all going to have to make sacrifices.”

One technology expert said cutting investments in technology isn’t the answer.

“This isn’t just about flipping a switch to move everything to the cloud” and other newfangled technologies, said Stephen O’Keefe, founder of MeriTalk Online, which analyzes government IT.

“This notion of reducing government spending on technology is ludicrous,” O’Keefe said. “This is the information age, so we need to use information technology to make government more effective. We have to invest in IT to get a better outcome.”

To Kundra, solving the IT problem will eventually help solve the budget problem.

“We have this old-world IT cartel,” he said, describing the slow-moving technology procurement process.

“But I’m still pushing this really simple question: Why is it that I have better technology at home than I do at work? To me, it just doesn’t make sense.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story misstated the savings of the administration’s cloud-computing email system.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:19 a.m. on April 19, 2011.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Zeeshan Aleem @ 04/19/2011 06:59 PM Inserted in papermate by ZA @ 6:55 PM 4/19 per Julia Haslanger CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story misstated the savings of the administration’s cloud-computing email system.