To CTO or not to CTO?

Yesterday, Angela talked about one of the new Obama administration's few unresolved appointments: the new "Chief Technology Officer," and even made a nomination of her own (not a bad pick).

I know a lot of folks are looking forward to having someone who personally represents the nation's technology policy the way, say, Hillary Clinton will represent the nation's foreign policy, or Joe Biden will represent the nation's...foreign policy. But given the sorry state of technology in just the White House itself, as reported last week by the Washington Post's Ann Kornblut, I'm not entirely certain that's top priority right now. What Mr. Obama needs in a CTO today, in my opinion, is someone who can give the Executive Branch the bandwidth it needs to conduct its business in the transparent and auditable way that he promised during his campaign.

Just yesterday, the White House's e-mail system reportedly crashed, after what may only be described as an abundance of use.

So in this particular instance, I don't think it's the time and place for the Big Picture, or a forthright discussion on "The Internet of Things" -- not when the President of the United States is so bound by tradition to doing most of his business on paper. The rethink of how technology should work for the United States should be focused, for now, upon Washington. Once it can untangle itself from its own dependence on 20th and even 19th century methodologies, the White House can stand as a model for the rest of America to untangle itself as well. This goes way, way, way beyond the issue of document format standards. We'll get to that point, hopefully within Mr. Obama's first term, but right now, we're still stuck at the staples-vs.-paper-clips phase of document standards.

Now, maybe Window Snyder's not a bad choice in that regard; but I would be happy if the President were to choose someone we've never heard of, from some consultancy that maybe a friend of a friend at the Pentagon recommended, in order to free the White House from what an ingenious Federal Express commercial of the 1970s called "The Paper Blob."