f When it's over, bet Vivek Kundra will be seen as good gov. hero! at Stephenson blogs on homeland security 2.0 et al.

« Why this blog is moribund, and why I believe what I’m doing instead is vital to the future | Home | Networked homeland security as model for piracy issue »

When it’s over, bet Vivek Kundra will be seen as good gov. hero!

By WDavidStephenson | March 16, 2009

As I said in my last post, I almost never blog any more.

However, I feel compelled to break my silence to let you know about the Vivek Kundra I know better than most — and trust implicitly!

As you may be aware, President Obama appointed him as the first U.S. CIO less than 2 weeks ago. Then, on Thursday he took a temporary leave of absence because the FBI had arrested an employee of his former office, the Office of the Chief Technology (OCTO) for the District of Columbia, and an outside contractor.

Since then, there’s been a lot of baloney and innuendo in the blogosphere that has besmirched this fine man’s reputation.

I don’t know anything more than you do about the investigation, but if anyone wants to set up a prediction market, I’ll be you dollars-to-donuts that when the truth comes out, it will show that the FBI was tipped off precisely because of policies and procedures Vivek set up immediately after he took office in early 2007.

Most important, this crime was exactly the kind of thing Vivek and Mayor Fenty worked so hard to eliminate from D.C., which unfortunately still has a reputation for corruption left over from the Marion Barry days, despite 10 years of reform mayors. They did that through a wide-ranging transparency strategy that — while it obviously hasn’t made corruption impossible — sure has made it easier for all of us, not just the FBI, to examine.

Most dramatic (and something that Vivek will bring to the feds through the new Data.gov site when he’s back on the job!) is the Citywide Data Warehouse, which feeds 274 streams of real-time, un-adulterated statistics about all sorts of DC governmental activities directly to the media,watchdogs, and the public, and invites us to scrutinize what they do. As the site says, the city views the feeds as “a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.”

In particular, I’d draw your attention to the feeds for:

If memory serves (I’m too busy to check ‘em out myself right now with the book thing) these files document all purchase orders for more than $2500 during that period ( incidentally you might want to search for the names of the two accused: Yusuf Acar, chief security officer for the CTO’s office, and Sushil Bansal, an outside contractor!).

To my knowledge, no other jurisdiction anywhere provides that kind of transparency about purchasing (and, had Vivek remained on the job, he and Mayor Fenty had additional steps in mind as well). Isn’t that exactly what you and I want for the massive stimulus bill, and don’t you want a guy with that kind of dedication & imagination back on the job ASAP designing the Recovery.gov. site to make certain it offers the same degree of transparency? I do.

And, if that’s not enough I directly your attention to testimony that Vivek gave before the DC City Council on Dec. 2007, on the specific steps he’d taken to put in place policies and procedures to eliminate and uncover corruption (including creating a wiki with specific whistleblower protections for those who report corruption to the FBI — which I bet may well pan out as the impetus for the FBI investigation :

“These controls are all part of a culture of accountability and innovation that, as I mentioned in my confirmation testimony, we are actively creating throughout OCTO. Innovation not only solves problems, it’s one of the best deterrents to corruption. Accountability and innovation keep processes, and personnel, from becoming so entrenched that an individual can beat the system by knowing every process, and every person, down to the tiniest detail and then exploiting them ….. I recognize that we can’t change people’s intent to do harm. But we can do our best to prevent the bad from entering our workforce. We can help the good to report the bad so we detect fraud early. We can deter the in-between from temptation through training and a culture of transparency, accountability, and innovation.”

Was this crime deplorable? You bet! Should it have been detected earlier? We’ll have to see what comes out in the trial.

However, mark my words: eventually this case will be seen as vindicating Vivek and underscoring the need for extending this kind of transparency to the federal government. The sooner he’s back on the job the better!

Tell a friend:

Technorati tags:

Sphere: Related Content

Topics: technology, empowering public, policy and politics, e-gov transformation | |