Obama’s CIO – questionable background

So first a little background. John C. Dvorak is a long time favorite IT commentator of mine. He’s a no nonsense, take no prisoners kind of guy. Make no mistake, he is no conservative shill. He lives near Berkley and in college wrote for a very liberal rag at Cal. Vivek Kundra has been appointed CIO by President Obabma. That being said, Dvorak became suspicious of this guy when he heard him testifying before congress. He just did not sound like someone who worked in the computer world.

“I first suspected something was fishy about this fellow by listening to him on CSPAN where he simply did not sound like someone who studied computers or technology. His common referrals to Twitter and Google Docs as some sort of high-tech breakthroughs and a way to save money and empower the public stemmed from pure cornball pop culture and the blogosphere, not from computer science or Information technology.

But, to be honest about it, and despite the possible fraudulent bios and non-existent degrees, the kicker for me was that even if he was squeaky clean he has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts.

He hasn’t done anything to warrant this appointment. There are no great policy papers. There are no books. There is no invention. There is nothing but vague tech positions in city and state governments. How does this make him a “techno-whiz” as he was portrayed by the New York Times? It took him six years to get a simple undergrad degree in psychology! Was it just because he uses Facebook and likes Twitter?

So what have we got so far from this person? Well, for starters we are looking at the Recovery.gov website that will cost the taxpayers around $18 million. This news was released recently. What websites costs $18 million? And that’s with no warrantee.

The incredibly popular Digg.com, one of the most advanced news gathering sites in the world was initially coded from scratch for between $1200-2500 according to one of its founders. Tools to develop fancy websites have improved drastically over the years and now it costs less for fancy sites, not more. So where is the $18 million going? I can assure you that people who pay attention bugged out their eyeballs at a website expense of $18 million.”

Read the rest of Dvorak’s article at Dvorak.org

Also, if you haven’t listened to John Dvorak with Adam Curry (yes the old MTV veejay) check out No Agenda episode 121 which is almost exclusively devoted to this travesty.