In what served as his public debut, newly appointed Federal CIO Vivek Kundra delivered a keynote message Thursday, underscoring that government does not have all the answers and needs a partnership with the private sector, the public and academia to succeed.

Kundra, named to the position in the Obama administration just last week, delivered his first speech at the third day of FOSE, the yearly government IT trade show in Washington, DC. Despite the challenges and problems, Kundra remains optimistic about the future of government IT.

"We want to be able to tap into the ingenuity of the American people," Kundra said. "It's going to take the vendor community, the American citizens, the federal workforce, and all of us working together to push forward with a vision of creating a more perfect union for technology and recognizing that the modern economy is powered by technology." 

The former chief technology officer of the D.C. government spoke about the need for the federal government to embrace Web 2.0 technology, citing that the best way to go about this was to re-engineer staffs rather than technology itself. In doing so, he believes that agencies will be better positioned to take advantage of evolving technologies, rather than trying to create them. Kundra also talked of a desire to be more aggressive in the field of cloud computing, of taking better advantage of free and available infrastructures (rather than building new ones) and of overhauling the procurement process so technology isn't obsolete by the time it's allowed to be utilized. 

His overarching goal (other than unity) is to lower the cost of government operations. "As a consumer, if you can go out there and buy technology for one-tenth of the cost of what the federal government pays, why is that?" Kundra asked. "What makes the government so special that they can't embrace some of these consumer technologies? What makes the government processes so different that there's no way the government can take advantage to lower the cost of technologies?" 

While such unity and progressive thinking sounds terrific, actually putting the wheels in motion on any of these projects may be another issue entirely. Before anything else, Kundra noted that Melissa Hathaway, of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, needed to complete her 60-day review of the nation's cybersecurity policies. He also invited anyone with ideas to email him personally, said he plans to hold "roundtables" once a week--either on Saturdays or Sundays--to essentially talk about ideas to move government forward technologically. 

So what do you think? Do you think Kundra is being too optimistic, or is his approach just the change that is necessary to move forward?