All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Norman Lorentz, anointed first chief technology officer for the Office of Management and Budget, seemed right at home among the dozens of tech chiefs gathered here last week for the InfoWorld CTO Forum, the world's only conference that's designed by CTOs, for CTOs, as its promoters proudly proclaim.
Although Lorentz now works for the public, heading the tech efforts of one of the largest public institutions on the planet -- the U.S. federal government -- he's had a long history of managing tech in the "private sector" and he still speaks in that hard-to-decipher, inside-baseball argot peculiar to tech executives.
He uses terms like "deliverables," "initiatives," "portfolios," "facilitate," and "G to C," "G to B" and "G to G" (for government-to-consumer, government-to-business and government-to-government). That kind of talk may now be out of fashion in some circles, but it's still chic among the tech set, and the executives here were mostly charmed by Lorentz's jargon-laden ideas for refashioning the federal government.
That's because Lorentz insisted during a speech to the techies that he looks to private-sector CTOs as his models for the work he does at the government. The federal government is often criticized for being slow, "bureaucratic," choking on red tape and gummed up with redundant, inefficient processes -- but the problems can be fixed with just a bit of business-savvy, Lorentz said.
Lorentz is the former CTO of the Postal Service, and it was during his tenure there, he said, that he realized government could learn a thing or two from tech businesses.
"Government truly can be transformed using the same approaches that we take in the private sector," he said. He added that the president is "in alignment with the idea" that citizens should have the same easy online relationship with government agencies that they have with businesses.
To that end, Lorentz is charged with spending a lot of money -- $48 billion in 2002, $52 billion in 2003 -- to solve a huge "change management problem" at the government. He lamented that the federal Internet is now composed of "islands of automation," a morass of 22,000 websites that don't quite talk to each other in any meaningful way.
To any outsider, even the experts gathered here, fixing such a mess seems a gargantuan, thankless task, especially in these times of increased government scrutiny. (Nobody wants to be on watch when the government sends out greeting cards to hijackers.)
So how does Lorentz plan to instill efficiency into an organization notorious for anything but?
One of his ideas is to outsource. Instead of creating brand new sites for government recruiting or procurement, or the host of other functions the United States intends to put online, Lorentz thinks it would be wiser to pay experienced companies to do the work.
"Why would we want to do it all internally if we could have, for example, a Monster gov recruitment site, or if we could 'private label' a Travelocity" -- to handle government travel -- "or an eBay" to do the government's purchasing, Lorentz asked.
He conceded there may be privacy or security concerns with handing over possibly sensitive functions to a third party, but Lorentz suggested that if such circumstances arise, some ventures could be created in the mold of the United States' national laboratories, which have private and public components. For instance, Sandia National Labs, which works on the nation's nuclear weapons, is a private corporation owned by Lockheed Martin, but is essentially managed by the Department of Energy.
But Lorentz made clear that these were merely his ideas and he gave no details of specific technologies he plans to use. When asked by someone in the audience what he thought of open-source software, Lorentz did say he thought open software would work well for the government but that it had to be proven as reliable.
And he said he was neither opposed to nor pushing for a national I.D. card, but there are probably some instances when a voluntary system might work well to "facilitate the speed" of some processes.
