Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once said, “The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important — and then gets out of the way while they do it.” Judging from the early strides taken by his administration, President Barack Obama appears to be someone who can get behind this sentiment. He and his chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, are intent on pushing federal agencies to compete against each other in putting their information on data.gov.

In an interview this week with Nick Thompson of Wired magazine, Kundra revealed more of the president’s plans to create transparency in government. Their shared premise is to democratize data and information by putting it into the public square. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed,” said Kundra.

One of the paths that they believe will lead them to the transparency promised land is the Information Technology Dashboard, set to be available at the end of June on data.gov. This feature will actually allow the American people to track IT spending by the federal government. On the Dashboard citizens will be able to follow each agency’s progress on specific IT projects, including the name of the agency head and CIO, who the prime contractors for the project are, and their actual success in staying within estimated costs and scheduling.

There is nothing like exposure when it comes to spurring performance. Having your name out there adds public accountability and a certain urgency of purpose. Nobody wants to appear to be pulling up the rear when it comes to finally getting the federal government ahead of the curve with technology.

When asked how he intends to encourage agency chiefs and their CIOs to be creative and innovative in moving forward on improving IT, Kundra responded jokingly that he is in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, but then more seriously added that one method he uses is simply leading by example. The improvements made by the administration to its own website, whitehouse.gov, will induce other agencies to compete in order to keep up with their leader, he believes.

Kundra also heads the CIO Council where he meets regularly with other agency CIOs to discuss their common vision of data transparency. The agencies are being asked to provide data that is as close to the “golden” source as possible—meaning original source. Kundra says that the data supply chain is too often choked with intermediaries that eventually cloud the original information. He would also like them to compete with each other in finding as many formats as possible for presenting data to insure the most access for the American people.

President Obama and CIO Kundra want to turn around a mindset of a federal government that as been historically way behind the rest of us technologically. One of the reasons the feds have always lagged behind, Kundra explains, is simply the procurement process that they must follow to acquire new technology. Right now it takes 18 months to 2 years to get the funding for improving IT in an agency. With the pace of tech innovation today, this puts agencies a good two years behind before they even start implementation.

Kundra sees an economic argument for improving the federal government’s use of technology to encourage and enable transparency. He says that providing the American people with the information will allow them to spot patterns and find new innovative paths to improving the way government works. Also, by leveraging technology that already exists, the government can spend one tenth of what it would have paid using previous methods.

Creating a competitive and exciting new environment for federal agencies to tackle their IT issues is a great way to bring about change. But there are still significant barriers that will have to be overcome. Change never comes easy—and as readers of OhMyGov! know, many longtime federal employees and contractors will find it difficult to let go of the old ways of doing things.

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