Kundra's big e-gov plans

Items on the e-government agenda at the Office of Management and Budget this fiscal year include cloud computing pilots and website development, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told FederalNewsRadio Wednesday.

Kundra, who recently returned from the West Coast, oversees $34 million appropriated this fiscal year for e-government to OMB via the General Services Administration. During the Bush administration, Congress typically gave only around $3 million annually to the centralized e-government fund. Most projects depended on agency funds, although Congress would sometimes prevent agencies from contributing to e-government projects utilized by more than one agency.

OMB will fund this year's creation of online tools that allow citizens to track the progress of a request and invest in cloud computing, Kundra said. It will also increase the data sets available in data.gov and create online analysis tools for the site, he added.

OMB will "focus early on in terms of thinking about mobile computing and thinking about how we will make those investments. When we look at the 2011 budget, we are able to start running when it comes to execution of those investments," he told FederalNewsRadio.

For fiscal 2011, OMB wants $50 million sent directly to it for a new fund it calls "Integrated Efficient and Effective Uses of Information Technology." It would use the money to create a set of "common platforms for universal tasks," according to OMB's fiscal 2011 budget request. The $50 million would allow the creation of several new online dashboards and a "FediPedia" collaborative website.

Kundra's approach has come under criticism by some former e-government officials, who worry that the federal CIO, also a Fed-100 winner, would create operational responsibilities for an agency typically dedicated to oversight. Some also fear that Kundra's focus on dashboards and mobile applications diverts efforts away from projects that could have wider impact on improved citizen services.

For more:
- read the FederalNewsRadio story
- check out the OMB fiscal 2011 budget request (.pdf)
- read Kundra's Fed-100 citation

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